Summer solstice or Litha/Alban Hefin

& pilgrimages & The Dharma Bums

Jun 20, 2024

In the northern hemisphere, June 20th/21st marks the summer solstice, point where the daylight is with us for the longest, and the dark at its shortest. The sun rises at its maximum northeasterly point, and sets at its most northwesterly. I love this fire festival but also find it quite demanding in a way that the ‘shoulder’ festivals of spring and autumn equinoxes are not. At those, I go deep. At the summer solstice I find myself a bit adrift. Consequently I find it hard to write about, and the solstice and equinox poems I’ve exchanged with a friend for maybe 15 years now are thinner poems at the summer solstice.

There are many memories that stick to this day for me. The first is perhaps hitchhiking as a teenager – without my parents’ knowledge – to Stonehenge free festival, where I camped round fires and with guitars with many other hippies in a small beech wood, and we walked to the stone circle at dawn (in those days the stones were not fenced off). As I left, someone I knew pressed a copy of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums into my hands. It’s true to say that both those events changed my life.

I also married on the summer solstice – in belting rain – and my new (now both ex- and late-) husband dropped the marriage certificate into a puddle as soon as we were outside (accidentally; but still. Yes, it did turn out to be symbolic.)

More recently, when I first met TM, we walked and camped along the Ridgeway, that prehistoric track that crosses from east to west, in southern and southwestern England for a few days, to arrive at the ancient megalithic site of Avebury spread out on the Wiltshire downs, with its huge stone circle, which by then I had decided was more significant than Stonehenge, and had a happy and rich time, until we found our car had been impounded; and when I arrived home my daughter’s much-loved pony, who was born to her little old mare, had been fatally injured.

So writing this I can see it’s not surprising that it’s a date that stirs mixed emotions for me.

However. One undilutedly happy memory is of the many years I took a group each solstice and equinox, no matter what the weather, on a daylong silent writing pilgrimage to Merrivale processional Bronze Age stone row on Dartmoor, in the UK. We would process in silence down the double stone avenue to arrive at a stone circle with a single menhir (standing stone).

Here’s a poem from one of those days.

Summer Solstice, Merrivale Stone Avenue and Circle

[After the horrors of battle] a strange madness came upon Myrddin… Into the forest he went, glad to lie hidden beneath the ash trees. He watched the wild creatures grazing on the pastures of the glades. He made use of the roots of plants and of grasses, of fruit from trees and of the blackberries in the thicket. He became a Man of the Woods, Myrddin Wyllt, as if dedicated to the woods. So for a whole summer he stayed hidden in the woods, discovered by none, forgetful of himself and of his own, lurking like a wild thing.*