# Solstice Stories

On the Hill of Tara, in Ireland, a fire was lit on the night of the summer solstice. Why light fire at the end of the longest day? Why not. For life, for fertility, for growth and green and goodness, for scaring away death, for entering the good night with generosity.

— Pádraig Ó Tuama

I have marked the solstices, equinoxes, and the cross-quarter dates for over four decades now. And, calendar aside, I frequently pause and think about the spinning and tilting of our orbiting earth and it always makes me feel my spirit grow. But there was one evening that remains vivid and moving in my memory.

Oh the carefree days of Summer always brings back special memories of childhood, growing up in Northern California, where a child could grow up with so much freedom and unstructured time and space to play.

Happy solstice! I hope you’re drinking in the light and reveling in whatever your perception reveals to you, wherever you are today.

What is light, then, when perception is altered? It is just as powerful: warmth on skin, vitamins straight from the sun, volume, sound bending upward not downward, a sense of stretching and embracing time, and the weight of expectation in the air.