Welcome to Litha Season
This year we have the amazing coinciding of the Summer Solstice, our annual peak solar energy, with the full Strawberry Moon, our monthly peak lunation energy.
Gift yourself a moment of allowing your eyes to close, breathing fully and deeply, and just take that in – feel the brightness and the bigness of the solar energy, and the brightness and the bigness of the lunar energy. Allow them to co-mingle within and as you to nourish all parts of your being.
A friend of mine recently shared with me that for her, this is the most magical time of the year. Now, I can really understand that as a folk herbalist, gardener and mom. This time is so alive with activity and growth, and I love being in the garden every day, seeing what’s flowering, what’s coming alive, what’s in its fullness. It's a pure delight to behold every day.
Personally, though, this time is a lot for me. I feel a sense of immense stretching with all of the activity, and it’s not my comfort zone, although I can appreciate it and work with harnessing the energies to direct them in a good medicine way. The peak heat and abounding fullness can often feel just a little too much for my sensitive nature.
So one of the opportunities of this time is to balance all of the doing and the activity and the manifestation into form with more North energy of quietude, resting, dreaming, visioning, sleeping. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Even just a little dip into those energies of the North/Winter time can really help support us in finding balance at such of fullness, brightness, and activity. A literal dip into the cool waters our Earth provides can help restore those parts of ourselves that may feel frayed or fried or stretched in this time of the highest light and doing, the peak of physical human activity.
In the ancestral, earth-based ways, this time of year is also known as Mid-summer. The beginning is marked by the energetic shift, around Beltane, not what we see in full physical expression. That feels very aligned to me and more easeful to my nervous system then this blast of all-ness in full expression declared the beginning. It's decolonizing to remember that everything begins in the invisible and to live by this truth.
Mid-summer, Summer Solstice, is also known as Gathering Day. It is the day where the fullest of the plant medicine is in the blossoms and the leaves. It is a day to harvest and gather those medicinal herbs that are ready. This Summer Solstice, I will be gathering up Thyme, Lavender, Sage, and Comfrey. Making offerings and laying them down in our drying rack to rest before becoming medicine.
Because of the coinciding of Summer Solstice and the Full Moon, it’s a really beautiful time to make medicine, especially flower essences and plant spirit medicines, the subtle vibrational medicines.
A full guide to essence making and plant spirit medicines can be found in Wheel Walkers: Beltane.
With the brightness of the sun and the moon, I will be making rose flower essence, lavender flower essence, tiger lily flower essence, and anise flower essence. I am deep into medicine-making with my daughter to create for the cooler months, and to share with our family and friends.
Other ritual ways to enhance and experience Summer Solstice:
1. Gather those herbs! Receive those culinary or medicinal herbs at their peak.
2. Immerse in the blossoms. Spend time appreciating the flowers and blossoms of this time. Around your own yard, neighborhood or at a local flower farm, it's a time to sink in with the flowers.
3. Write yourself a letter to open deep in the winter cave at Winter Solstice. Share anything that you want yourself to remember at the opposite energies of our annual cycle.
4. Sun Salutations & Moon Salutations. Honor and experience the fullness of the sun and the moon this week with morning and evening salutation practices for embodied movement.
5. Gift yourself a moment of taking a quick inventory of all of your dreams that have come into manifestation this solar cycle! So often we experience and move on too quickly. Rest in a moment of sacred pause to genuinely appreciate what has moved from the Winter dream seed into form. Celebrate it! Dance! Honor the divine creatrix you are!
6. Gather with community to share in an evening fire, dance party, a festive outer expression of our joy and gratitude for this time of year. Feast and be merry!
7. Kitchen Witchin’. Craft beautiful meals for the Solstice – try this delightful recipe!
The Litha Wheel Walkers is now on sale – an earth-based animist approach to cyclical living to guide our lives as the ceremony that they are.
This season includes an audio course & robust PDF guide that contains…
✨ Energies of the Direction
✨ Sit-spot Contemplations & Nature-connection practices
✨ Ancestral Arts & Handcrafts
✨ Seasonal Altar Creation
✨ Kitchen Witchery - Food Medicine & Recipes
✨ Sacred Plant Medicine - Folk Healing & Seasonal Remedies
✨ Ceremony Invitations & Ritual Guidance
✨ Body Temple Care and Focus
✨ Life Cycle Orientation
✨ BONUS! Self-Marriage Ceremony PDF Guide
✨ BONUS! Summer Breathwork Video
...all for $55.
This month’s breathwork is on Sunday, June 30. Join me.
In celebration of the fullness,
Marianne