the summer solstice

I live in a humid climate and don’t typically love the buzzing heavy heat of summer. Midsummer, I’m usually hiding out indoors.

This year, however, I have found I crave the sun on my skin. I find moments to sit beneath the sun, and it’s as if I’m downloading healing energy - pure golden bliss - into my cells.

I need this healing.

The Summer Solstice is traditionally my favorite energy shifts of the year. This morning, as I sit with my coffee, I am hoping the solstice brings the uplift it has delivered in the past.

The past few weeks with their heavy energy of retrogrades and who-knows-what-else have been difficult.

I find myself completely depleted and flattened.

Exhausted.

Empty.

I feel a bit like a wrung-out washcloth.

I can point to things in the external world that are contributing to my fatigue - moving back into the world after a year in house, going maskless after a year of wearing a mask, being around groups of people again…the political climate…insurrectionists, mass shooters…transitions in my personal life and relationships…

I also know that what I’m experiencing right now is about energetics.

It’s spiritual, metaphysical, and can be clarified in the astrological.

I’m examining my life and my work, sorting out what can move forward and what can’t, but even if I weren’t doing this consciously, it’s being done to me (for me) subconsciously.

My sleep is deep and dreamless, yet I wake up feeling like I’ve just run a marathon.

I was recently worried about something.

This worry grew in me and expanded and began to consume me - my mind, my body. I was driving down the road and realized I couldn’t tell if my worry about this thing was an intuitive warning or premonition or my anxiety disorder.

Energy doesn’t lie, but anxiety does.

I was alone in the car so I just started praying. Out loud. For the rest of my drive home I talked to God.

(Every single time I use the word God, I feel the need to clarify - I’m not talking about a big man in the sky. Do you even care? I don’t know. But I care. Anyway...)

This worry was about another person, not me, so I asked God to surround this person, to protect them, to shield them in light. I poured out everything - my fears, my desires, my request, and surrendered it all and when I was finished talking, I felt a deep peace move through me.

It was a real peace, but momentary.

Letting go is hard.

Letting go of things I don’t care about is hard; letting go of things I care deeply about is super hard.

And that’s where I find myself here at the Summer Solstice - standing on shifting ground, listening to my solar plexus, opening my hands, letting go, letting go, letting go…

I hear people say that life is random. The things that happen in our lives hold no pattern or meaning.

I’ve never felt that to be true.

I hear people say that God is in control of everything that happens, and I know what they mean is a man-God who moves us around the pieces on a game board.

I don’t believe this either.

I believe in free will and divine intervention.

The God of my heart isn’t the God of exclusivity; they are the God of beginnings, the source and sustainer of all life, the life force of love that moves through us, uniting us, breathing into us.

When I pull my focus out and see myself in the world, I see the breathing. I see that the earth breathes, the universe breathes, I breathe, and when I align my breath with the larger cosmic breath, we are in harmony.

I am not creating everything that happens in my life any more than I am a hapless victim of life tossed around on the high seas.

When I do the work of authenticity, I am in symbiosis.

We breathe in and out - me, God, the universe - we breathe in and out and as I co-create my life I am also in acceptance of that which I cannot control.

I do not believe that everything is fated, but I know that some things are.

My spiritual practice, which is the practice of life, is all about finding my natural set point in the center of God’s movement. I seek to be balanced in the giving and receiving, the spiral dance of what I am creating in my life and what I am being given.

I am on a journey.

I do not believe God tests or punishes, but sometimes God, which is to say Love, which is to say the Source of all Life, shows me where I have been and how I have grown. Sometimes God guides me by giving me an opportunity to face the very same things I have faced in the past and make a different choice.

God is the God of infinite chances and opportunities.

God is the God of abundance and flow.

So eclipse season has flattened me; I’m ready for new energy to be poured into my cup.

I recognize…

I’m no longer in my young life.

I’m in my wise life now.

I welcome this new phase.

I welcome the sun.

I welcome the Solstice.

I’m not sure where I’m going, but I know how to put one front in foot of the other.

I’m not sure where I’m going, but I trust it’s where I need to go.

I trust you’re going where you need to go, too, and I wish you the joy of the summer sun.