MIDSUMMER CELEBRATION 2022
The place is called Lower Parting, though it is actually a joining. The parting is 3km (just under two miles) up river. There, the River Severn divides into two channels, east and west, to flow around Alney Island. When taking the picture above, I was standing near the point where the channels meet again. It was around 9 a.m. on 22 June. I had not been there before.
Although every time and place is ultimately sacred, some times and places are easier for me to honour. In my experience this is partly a property of the times and places, partly down to culture and tradition, and partly to do with my own inner and outer availability.
On this occasion, I was within a midsummer period which for me lasts from a day or so before the solstice until around 25 June. I like to acknowledge the stasis (standstill) element within the solstice experience. It is not just about a point of time. Like its midwinter opposite and twin, my midsummer allows an extended pause before the wheel of the year turns. My walk on 22 June was an intentional celebration of the midsummer stasis, something between an outdoor walking meditation and a miniature festival pilgrimage. It was built around my first encounter with an intuited special place, now that I am fit enough once more to walk the required distance.
I can easily understand why people in many parts of the world have seen water, especially flowing water, as sacred. I am on a quiet part of a quiet island in the middle of Gloucester city. The wetland here is blissfully unfit for development, and now a nature reserve. I was able to stand here and look out at the joining of the waters, under a blue sky, and surrender to a benign spirit of place. I didn’t have to attend to my attention. In this extended, flowing, moment, nature was doing that for me. I found, here, a generous horizon, and a living peace that invites participation. I am glad and grateful to have discovered this place on this day.
In my tradition, at every seasonal festival, we are asked to think not only of the time we are celebrating, but also of its opposite. Walking back from Lower Parting, I see features in the landscape that help me. My pictures below do not evoke winter, but they do show light and shade within a single image. On planet Earth, the time of my summer is the time of someone else’s winter. These are both ways in which opposites complement each other in an interconnected world.
This is my image of Autumn for this year. Before Samhain. Before most of the fall. Leafy and watery. The sun is still an influence, a soft one. I took the picture this morning whilst walking in Ninesprings (one word), the gem of the Yeovil Country Park.
This is Wyndham Hill, Yeovil. I was born only a few hundred yards away, and I felt a close connection with it throughout my childhood. As representing ‘nature’ or the countryside, it felt safe when I was little and reassuring later on. It hasn’t changed much, and I am still reassured.
Above is the house I grew up in – the grey one. It was a pharmacy when I lived there, though it ceased to be that in 1973, three years after I left home at the age of 21. Its value as a retail site and community resource had long been weakened by a movement of people away from the old town and the building of a ring road within the modern town rather than around it. I don’t know about the later history of the house that brought about its dereliction. Clearly the house doesn’t now evoke the sense of safety and reassurance that it once did.
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