Explaining Solstice

Today I got an email asking me to explain why pagans celebrate the solstice.  My fellow classmate was hoping to have me write something up for our seminary's monthly journal.  I find it hard to remember that so many people know so little about pagan practices.  Even though Winter Solstice is included as a sign of interfaith recognition, it seems that a lot of people know very little about what this holiday has meant to human beings for tens of thousands of years.  I obviously can't speak for all of them.  I can't even speak for modern day pagans.  But I reworked something else I had written previously to reflect the beliefs of my tradition and offered this up (along with the recipe in last year's blog entry).

Summer Solstice, the Apex of Light

Happy Solstice!!

Let's start off with a little science lesson.  June 20th was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.  Here in Northern California, on this day the sun rose at 5:48am and set at 8:35pm, for an impressive 15 hrs 47 mins of sunlight.  This is compared to the shortest day of the year, which will be this coming December 21st, when there will only be 10 hrs 33 mins of sunlight here in the Bay Area.  This difference in the amount of light we get as the days either move towards or away from the summer solstice is all a result of the tilted axes on which our planet revolves.

Potential Energy and The Spark of Life

Fire is an important element of this holiday.

Happy Beltane!!

I had the opportunity this Beltane to be part of a class centering moment.  This week's focus in our Christian Worship class is on the liturgical year and, as the calendar would have it, it landed exactly on May 1st.  So as I gathered with my fellow students (all of whom are Christian), we talked about how to center the class and bring in this discussion about my pagan holiday.


We eventually settled on a very simple lay out.  We started with a Christian song we sang in a round, followed by a scripture reading, and lastly I spoke and then guided the class in a pagan song.  One of my fellow group members liked the idea of creating a trajectory from God to Goddess, but I struggled with that, both because of the dualism and the fact that I didn't really want to talk about the Goddess.  We talk enough about the Goddess at PSR.  I wanted to talk about the Spark of Life.

Spring Equinox

Spring has come.

In the middle of this great life shift, as I shed old pieces of myself, I am reminded today that we are never too old for new beginnings.  Like a empty plot of land, flat and filled with nothing more than dirt, our presentation before we fully transform can be deceiving. If we rely too much on the people in our lives to act as a mirror to help us know ourselves, we can be fooled into believing that we are only what we appear to be.

But eventually, spring comes.

You say Savior, I say Sun King

I live in a row of old apartment buildings in Astoria, NY.  Just across the East River of Manhattan, my Queens apartment is relatively affordable and spacious.  The buildings butt up directly to one another, creating a corridor down our street and a continuous line of rooftops.  It was up on my roof (four stories up) where I had my winter solstice ritual this morning.

The Promise of Harvest

It's a humid and stormy Lammas this year in Queens. Like so many other Witches, I look for symbolism in nature to help better connect with my own path and the wheel of the year as it turns. Stormy and uncomfortably sticky seems to be quite apt for harvest this year. Lammas (or Lugnasadh as was called by the Gaels) was an ancient harvest festival celebrated in the British Isles. Modern day neo-pagans have reclaimed the holiday as one of their eight holy days. Celebrated each year on August 1st, Lammas is the first of the harvest holidays and generally represents the hard work and sacrifice that it takes to reap what we have sown.