On this solstice day I’m missing the Northern Hemisphere a lot. My boys met each other on their separate journeys today, going to West Kennett Long Barrow, Silbury Hill and Avebury, where the druids were gathering and glasses of mulled cider were drunk in the warmth of an English pub. They are gathering to celebrate the coming of the light.

_{Avebury Stone Circle, Winter Solstice}

Here in Australia I received a Christmas card covered in the glitter of snow. Yet the harsh Australian sunlight would melt all that in an instant. It’s the longest day of the year here and an outward time – yang energetics, a time of doing. The weeds need pulling, the garden needs pruning and watering, the abundance of produce needs dealing with. Yesterday I burned when I forgot sunblock.

Why is it we don’t celebrate solstice here?

We’re a young country and though we have put down roots here for some two hundred years, we’ve worked hard to leave behind our past in other countries to form something new. Yet still, the Christmas traditions persist. Though we had every opportunity to worship new Gods, we instead called it Terra Nullius, owned by no-one, and re-wrote this southern land as an extension of England. We walked in and ignored the First People here. Since settlement, the myth persists that they were nomadic and hunter gatherer, when in actuality, they had systems of agriculture too that could have been part of a collective wisdom. How inattentive we were to the bounty of this place. It must have been strange it must have been for the first settlers to plant crops in perpetual sunshine in the colonies around Sydney, in soil unsuited for European crops. There was a forcing of the land to suit this sensibility, rather than an observance of what was.

Founded after enlightenment, we were pre-disposed toward science – sun Gods replaced by a adherents to a Christian faith and God that rejected all else as heresy and savagery. Whilst the old sun Gods in Europe and Asia never really died, despite the church attempting to reject all such heresy, we never brought them with us in the first place – we drowned them in boats on the long crossing and offered them up to the white hot skies in hope that we’d survive in a hostile land that apparently belonged to no one or wanted to kill us.

Yet whilst we refused to, Aboriginal people did mark solstice.

Near here in Victoria, about an hour away, is a stone circle that pre-dates Stonehenge. Whilst settlers didn't even believe that they could count, the Watthawurrung had a system of astrology too. The waist high bounders mark the setting of the sun at the summer and winter solstice, and the axis from top to bottom points to the equinox.


Stones at Wurdi Youang

Yet we say summer starts on the 1st of December, when the most amount of light is around the 21st, and we have months of warm weather to come.

One reason, I read, for the rejection of the astrological mark of seasons was that in the early days of the Colony, the NSW Crops changed from their summer to winter uniforms at the beginning of the month, and thus the seasons are marked on the 1st day rather than to the wheel and turn of the planets. Perhaps it was hard to mark the astrology they knew when everything, including the stars across the night sky, were upside down? And more than this, the four seasons of the northern hemisphere didn’t fit the seasonal change here – there was no ‘winter’ in the way that there might be winter in North America or Europe.

The splashes of red autumnal colours are limited to areas where imported trees were planted – everywhere else is perpetual, endless, evergreen eucalyptus. It seems ironic to me that that yuletide symbol of the pine which symbolised perpetual life is still brought into the house here as a Christmas tree yet all around us we’re surrounded by evergreen and have no real need for bringing nature indoors.

Nothing makes sense. We celebrate Halloween when it’s hot, and the harvest is yet to come. We buy Christmas paper with snowy themes when we could be on the beach in blistering weather. There’s a disconnect between dates on a calender and what’s actually going on in this country weather wise – in some places, it can be merely divided into wet and dry, in others, six seasons would be more appropriate.

_{In particular districts, six seasons are far more appropriate}

Being a migrant culture of Chinese and Vietnamese, post war Europeans, Scottish and Irish and German and Croatian and everything in between, it’s hard to say ‘this is what we are’. Whilst every culture in the world seems to have some kind of midwinter or midsummer festival, we chug along in blissful ignorance of the movements of the planets, the tilt of the sun, unless it’s a total fire ban day and we’re bemoaning climate change.

Yet I can’t not celebrate solstice, because I like to connect to the spirit of the Earth and the sky, the entire world around me. I can’t just ignore that we’re just in a pause, a poise, between the past and the future, the old and the new, the sowing and the reaping, the planting and the harvest. Here, we’re in a time of abundance – the zucchinis are growing fat, the basil is rich and fully scented, the hops are beginning to fatten, the plums hang like pregnant bellies on the trees. It’s a bitter sweet time – bitter, because I know it will pass, and sweet, because I’m revelling in it right now. Seems to me a metaphor at play. I can choose to lament and worry over what is done this year, and re-work it all in my mind, or I can choose to revel in the hard work done and enjoy the moment in the sunshine. I can take stock on the year and consider what is next. Whilst summer is not traditionally a time of reflection, perhaps I’m too aligned with my friends here in the northern hemisphere to really ignore the stock take.
In the midst of winter, one would take stock on the stores that had been prepared in harvest time and feast on the ones that might not last. The Christmas feast is reminiscent of that time. One would assess what one needed to survive the winter.

Whether it’s winter solstice or summer solstice, this time is a good a time as any to let go what we don’t need, hold onto the things that will serve us, and look cheerfully the year ahead, whether it’s the dark days that are coming, or the light days that are remaining.

How do you celebrate solstice?

What do you hold on to, and what do you need to let go?