Midsummer in Wales

Posting this for Sara Polke-Johns who sent it to me via email:
Midsummer’s Day was the 15th anniversary of my Buddhist Ordination. I’ve always been delighted that I was ordained on such an auspicious day. Last evening my husband and I celebrated by toasting the sun lengthening the shadows on the fields  from our Welsh garden, with of course strawberries

Throughout we were loudly serenaded by our resident Song Thrush. When it eventually became cooler we watched the film of Midsummer Night’s Dream. All immensely lovely

Midsummer Sun

In my latest newsletter, I mentioned that I was overwhelmed by the prospect of writing eight or nine articles every month for my Living in Season magazine, and all sorts of readers have stepped forward, offering to share with me their ideas and writing. I am slowly making my way through the responses, and learning so much as I go.

For instance, Debra Redalia sent me a link to her blog, Rooted in Nature, and I loved her last blog entry about a new web site she discovered, Gaisma, (the name is Latvian for “light”)which provides stunning graphs showing the amount of sunlight at different times of the year. I’ve found this information on other web sites but not with such clear visuals.

I played around with several scenarios, including my location (Seattle) and Costa Rica near the equator. In Costa Rica, the difference between the amount of sunlight at Midsummer and Midwinter is 1 minute. In Seattle, it’s 7 and 1/2 hours. I like sunshine but I’m not sure I would like living in a place where the amount of light was so even all year around.

Photo of Golden Gate Park taken during my recent trip to San Francisco.

Making Midsummer Wreaths

Until I bought a copy of Elizabeth Jane Lloyd’s, The Enchanted Circle, I did not think I had the ability to create a wreath. All my attempts were pitiful things, limp and disheveled with bits and pieces sticking out here and there. Looking at the photographs of the gorgeous wreaths Lloyd created I was inspired. Reading her directions on how to create a wreath, I recognized that it was a craft, like baking, which is best done when following directions. Although I know people who can bake a cake from scratch without a recipe, I am not one of them.

I failed to realize, in my early attempts, that a wreath needs a firm base. The base serves as the framework for the decorative material. You then match the delicacy of the materials to the appropriate base. There are many materials you can use for a wreath base but here are the three most common:

Wire
You can make a wire wreath by bending an old coat hanger into a circle, which has the benefit of providing a hook at the top. You can also use various strengths of wire you buy at a hardware store. Two circles of wire joined can provide a strong framework for heavy materials, like evergreens. Very thin florist’s wire should be used for a more ethereal wreath, for instance, for making a chaplet of orange blossoms. To hide the wire base, you might want to wrap the wire with ribbon or florist’s tape. The one disadvantage of a wire wreath is that you cannot throw it on the Summer Solstice bonfire because of the wire it contains.

When working with a wire base you will probably be adding materials in clusters. You can gather a group of flowers, or pieces of greenery, and place them against the wire frame, then use a thin, supple florist’s wire to hold them in place. Don’t cut the wire, but overlap the join with another cluster of flowers or greens, and continue wrapping your way around the frame.

In some wreaths, materials are arranged in a continuous circle, with all the clusters facing the same direction. To finish this sort of wreath you just need to tuck the join of the end cluster under the first cluster. In other wreaths, you might work down both sides to have the clusters meet at the bottom. With this arrangement, you will end up with a bare spot which you can cover with a ribbon or a rosette of your materials.

Wire wreaths, because they are usually delicate, tend to be used for light materials, like feathers or ivy or snowdrops. You can use a sturdy piece of wire and thread it directly through chilis (leaving them lengthwise) or apples to create interesting wreaths.

Vine
I love using vines for a wreath base since it makes the wreath totally organic. Honeysuckle, wisteria, willow and grapevine are the usual vines used for wreaths. If you can find fresh materials, twine them into a circle and let them dry. If you’ve purchased or been given vines that aren’t fresh, soak them in water until they’re pliable and can be shaped.

When working with a vine base, you can often tuck the flowers and leaves into the many nooks and crannies in the wreath, without using wire or tape. If you want to use a fastening device, but be able to keep the wreath organic, use raffia or string. For a truly organic binding device, I use bindweed (morning glory). When picked fresh, it retains that elastic, spiraling quality that makes it such a menace in the garden. Jane Lake (who has a great article on how to create a vine wreath) uses another common weed local to her area: Virginia Creeper.

Janet Lloyd uses vine bases for wreaths featuring hops, lime twigs and leaves, rose hips, berries, jasmine, roses and freesias. I tuck freshly picked hydrangea blossoms into my vine base, then add more to fluff it up as the first blossoms dry and shrivel in size.

Straw
Straw makes a sturdier but heavier base. You can buy straw wreaths at most craft stores or make one yourself by wrapping straw in a circular form and binding it with string or straw. The advantage of a straw base is that you can spike things into the straw, either using florist’s picks (sort of like bobby pins for flowers) or the stems of your plant materials. You can also use a glue gun to affix items but then your wreath will be permanent, whereas the other items can be removed when you want to change your wreath.

Lloyd uses straw bases for wreaths featuring dried flax and sandalwood flowers, dried herbs and flowers, dried poppy heads and bunches of wheat, oats and barley. Straw serves as an appropriate backdrop in both color and feel for these items. Lloyd also shows a very dramatic and effective wreath made by gathering several strands of straw into three thick strands and plaiting these into one thick braided wreath.

It is, of course, possible to make a wreath completely out of natural materials (think daisy chain) but these tend to have the same floppy nature as a daisy chain. Lloyd also shows examples of wreaths made by gluing dried flowers or seashells on a cardboard base; plaiting the stems of onions or garlic into a circle, and placing live plants in a circle of sphagnum moss.

I challenge myself to make wreaths for each seasonal holiday using only items I can find within a few blocks of my home. This keeps me aware of all the changes in vegetation in my neighborhood, constantly scanning for the materials for my next wreath.

Nocino (Walnut Liqueur) and Honeyed Walnuts

Walnuts have magical properties at Midsummer in Italy and are used to make a special liqueur called Nocino. People go into the woods to collect walnuts on the night of San Giovanni (June 23) when the shells are still green and soft. They are collected in multiples of 21 (the 3 of the Trinity times the 7 virtues), immersed in alcohol with special spices or lemon rind and left for 40 days (the same amount of time St John wandered in the desert). Some say the green walnuts can only be harvested by women in bare feet with wooden scythes.

Anna Tasca Lanza in The Flavors of Sicily offers a recipe for Nocino, whose mysterious, almost medicinal flavor, she compares to liqueurs made by medieval monks. Once you have picked your green walnuts, cut them into quarters. (Wear gloves and protect your surfaces as green walnuts exude a colorless liquid, that upon exposure to air turns brown and dyes everything it touches, permanently.) For every ten walnuts use one cup of sugar, a small piece of cinnamon stick, two whole cloves, a tablespoon of chopped lemon zest and one quart of vodka. Combine these ingredients, seal in a jar, and leave in the sun for forty days. Strain the liqueur (you can adjust the flavor at this point by adding water if it’s too strong), bottle it and put it away in a cool, dark place to age until I Morti, All Soul’s Day, November 2.

For those of you who are looking for something a little lighter, here’s a recipe I found on the internet which combines walnuts with another midsummer treat: honey.

Combine one and a half cups sugar, a half cup honey, a dash of salt in a saucepan. Bring to a boil then cook, without stirring, until a small amount of mixture forms a firm ball when dropping in cold water. This will be about 242° on candy thermometer. Remove syrup from heat and stir in eight ounces of walnuts and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. Let cool slightly. Stir until thicken and creamy. Pour out onto waxed paper; using 2 forks, separate walnuts.

Found the great photo at this web site, Foreign Remarks, by Rebecca Helm-Ropelator. She also provides a recipe for nocino.

The photo of the jug of walnuts steeping in alcohol comes from this web site which also has a recipe and instructions.

Another great blog entry about nocino: she descibes the look as similar to motor oil but the flavor as nutty and sweet and she says creates an odd sensation as it makes its way down to your stomach. It’s often used as a digestive, to soothe an upset stomach. It seems to be the perfect drink for winter which is when it’s ready to drink.

Celebrating Summer Solstice

by Waverly Fitzgerald

The summer solstice is the time when the sun is in its glory. This is the longest day of the year and the shortest night. The date of the summer solstice varies slightly from year to year. This year it falls on June 21st. Summer solstice customs are also associated with a fixed date: June 24 the Midsummer’s Day. June 23rd is Midsummer’s Eve.

As the name “Midsummer” indicates, this is considered the height of the summer. Yet there is an undertone of darkness in the light. While we celebrate the power of the sun, we also note its decline. From now on the hours of sunlight will decrease.

The Fire and the Sun

The great solar festival of the year is celebrated from North Africa to Scandinavia with fire. This is a traditional time for a bonfire which is lit as the sun sets. People dance around the fire clockwise and carry lit torches. In some places, they set fire to wheels of hay which are rolled downhill.

Flowers and May Day wreaths are tossed into the fire. They burn and die just as the heat of the summer consumes the spring and brings us closer to the decline of autumn and the death of vegetation in winter. As we begin the decline, it’s important to remember that the wheel of the year is a circle. The spring will come again. The sun will triumph over the darkness again. Thus, the circle is an important symbol. Wreaths are hung on doors. People gaze at the fire through wreaths and wear necklaces of golden flowers.

Before the calendar was changed in the 18th century, Midsummer fell on 4th of July. When you celebrate Fourth of July, think of all those brilliant fireworks and blazing Catherine wheels as devotions in honor of the sun.

St John and Honeymoons

Midsummer’s Eve is also called St John’s Eve. The official version says that St. John was assigned this feast because he was born six months before Christ (who gets the other great solar festival, the winter solstice). Actually it may have more to do with the story of St John losing his head to Salome. In ancient times, a ritual sacrifice was made to the goddess of midsummer.

Other midsummer symbols also accumulate around St John. He’s the patron of shepherds and beekeepers. This is a time to acknowledge those wild things which man culls but cannot tame, like the sheep and bees. The full moon which occurs in June is sometimes called the Mead Moon. The hives are full of honey. In ancient times, the honey was fermented and made into mead. According to Pauline Campanelli in The Wheel of the Year, this is the derivation of honeymoon.

This is a traditional time for honoring water, perhaps because it plays such a vital role in maintaining life while the sun is blazing overhead. Several of the goddesses worshipped at midsummer — Matuta, Anahita and Kupala — are associated with moisture and dampness. St John baptized with water while Christ baptizes with fire and the Holy Spirit. In Mexico, St John presides over all waters. People dress wells and fountains with flowers, candles and paper festoons. They go out and bathe at midnight in the nearest body of water. In the city, they celebrate at the bathhouse or pool with diving and swimming contests.

Herbs and Lovers

Midsummer Eve is also known as Herb Evening. This is the most potent night (and midnight the most potent time) for gathering magical herbs, particularly St John’s wort, vervain, mugwort, mistletoe, ivy and fern seed. In some legends, a special plant, which is guarded by demons, flowers only on this one night a year. Successfully picking it gives one magical powers, like being able to understand the language of the trees.

This is also a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says “Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking.” According to Dorothy Gladys Spicer in The Book of Festivals, Irish girls drop melted lead into water and interpret the shapes it makes. In Spain, girls do the same with eggs. In Poland, they combine three of the symbols of the holiday for a divination. Girls make a wreath of wild flowers, put a candle in the middle, set it adrift on the river and tell the future by observing its fate.

Celebrating

This is a great festival to celebrate outdoors. Go camping. Go out into the woods or up into the mountains or down to the beach. Find some place where you can build a bonfire and light it when the sun sets. Bring along plenty of flowers (especially roses or yellow flowers like calendulas, St John’s wort, or marigolds). Fashion them into wreaths, wear them as you dance around the fire and throw them into the fire at the end of the night. Bring along sparklers too (but use them carefully). Indoors, use whatever symbols represent light and warmth to you: golden discs, sunflowers, shiny metal trays, chili pepper lights.

Gather magical and healing herbs at night on June 23. Hang St John’s wort over your doors and windows for protection; toss some on the fire as well. Harvest your garden herbs now so they will be extra potent.

To acknowledge the gift of water in your everyday life, decorate the faucets in your house. Z Budapest in The Grandmother of Time suggests walking to the nearest body of water, making a wish and then throwing in a rose you have kissed to carry your wish home. She provides the following wishing poem:

Yes, you are here in the soft buzzing grass.
Yes, you are listening among the flowering gardens.
Yes, you are shining from the most royal blue sky.
Yes, you are granting me what I wish tonight.
Grant me a healthy life rich with high purpose,
A true partner to share my joys and my tears,
Wisdom to hear your voice giving me guidance,
Wealth to give to others as you have given to me.

Honoring Your Strength

The sun is associated with will, vitality, accomplishment, victory and fame. As you throw your flowers into the fire, acknowledge your accomplishments. Write about these at length in your journal, perhaps while sipping a cup of tea sweetened with honey, or gather your friends in a circle and go around several times with each person boasting about their strengths. Assign a different topic for each round, for instance, aspirations, courage, achievement, competence. Toast each other (with mead, if you can find it). This is your night to shine.

This is an excerpt from my book, Celebrating the Seasonal Holy Days, which also contains ideas and suggestions for the other seasonal holidays like Lammas, Autumn Equinox, Yule and so forth. It is available for purchase at my store.

The same material, much expanded, can be found in my Midsummer packet, also available at the store for immediate download.

The attributed photos were taken by School of the Seasons readers who contributed them for my Leaves on the Tree of Time weekly planner.

Some cool links I found while looking for images:

A great article from Max Dashi on Midsummer dances.

A lovely entry about Latvian Midsummer celebrations.

Article about a Polish Midsummer celebration in Washington D.C. showing girls throwing their flower wreaths into the Reflecting Pool.

Memory Lapse, Taxonomy, the Platonic Fallacy & The Common Sense

By Bill Felker

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,–daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Henry David Thoreau

Lately I’ve been forgetting the names of some of the wildflowers I’ve identified through the years. I’ve also been forgetting the names of a few of my old acquaintances.

“Hey, how ya doin’?” I greet them, adding a soft mumble for the person’s name. Sometimes the other people remember who I am. Sometimes they mumble the same way I do. Sometimes a bob of the head is part of the ritual as though the person were choking on something or about to cough.

It’s easy to look up the forgotten flowers in my botanical references. Since I don’t have a people reference with photos, however, it often takes me a while to figure out the name of the man or woman I have just encountered. And even the momentary loss of a name is disconcerting in that the cerebral landscape suddenly becomes less familiar than it was seconds before. In some ways, the experience is like one of my repeating dreams in which I walk lost down a familiar childhood street on which everything has changed.

As I am accustomed to making much out of little, I worry that I’m losing my grip. After all, the process of taxonomy (naming things) is the way of the scientific world, the business world, the academic world, the broad world of social intercourse. I remind myself without names, there is no language and no human identity.

I weigh options and choices. Should I really bother to take the time to distinguish between silverweed and a flower that looks a little like wild strawberry? I always have. Is my acquaintance with what’s-his-name superficial, and that’s why I don’t recognize who he is? Am I simply forgetting, with good reason, the unimportant people in my life? That is also possible. Perhaps I do not recognize so-and-so because I have no need or desire for significant intimacy with her. That is likely.

Or maybe these aren’t the real issues at all. Maybe my organism is simply shedding its skin and preparing me for the great winnowing, the long oblivion. Is this intermittent forgetfulness, I wonder, the ante-room of a final metaphysical and psychological journey, the onset of dementia, incipience of Alzheimer’s? I ruminate and pick the scab of my memory lapse, trying to make sense of my aging.

Then, finally, I have it. I conclude that my anguish is merely a kind of disorientation caused by the perfidious Platonic Fallacy. That philosophic error was spawned by several of Plato’s dialogues in which Socrates encouraged people to think that ideas and their names were more permanent and ultimately more important than material objects, that the idea of a chair, for example, was more durable than the transitory, material chair from which the idea came.

Silly Plato! Silly Socrates! The truth is that any theory of ideas is useful only if you can remember. Once you forget the name of what’s-her-name, then her physical presence is much more significant than any conceptual shenanigans. My body, then, is simply telling me to get real. It is telling me that what’s-her-name simply is, and that, as Sartre said over half a century ago, existence indeed precedes essence.

And so I embrace the existential wisdom brought on by changes in my brain, allowing expedient insight to shatter arrogant and youthful concepts about high reasoning and subtle wordsmithing. I embrace the consolation of my friend, Henry what’s-his-name, his talk of mysteries, “daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense!”

Bill Felker observes nature in Yellow Springs, Ohio and records his observations in Poor Will’s Almanack. This is a reprint of the essay he wrote for June in the 2005 edition.

Coast Starlight

I took the train to San Francisco to take a one-day workshop on distilling essential oils from plants with legendary herbalist, Jeanne Rose. And I chose the train for two reasons: 1) taking the Coast Starlight is on my list of things I want to do in my lifetime and 2) I hate air travel and I wanted to find an alternative mode of transportation.

Before I left I envisioned the train as a sort of coffee shop where I could sit with my laptop in front of me and read and write, while gazing out the window at stunning scenery. The stunning scenery was there (except for half of the 22 hours it was dark so no scenery whatsoever) but I couldn’t really plug in my laptop and use it at my seat because I had an aisle seat and I didn’t want to drape the cord over my seat mate. And there was no wifi on the train.

My seatmate was a guy named Ted who’s on his way to meet his wife with whom he’s going to drive a semi trailer full of cooking equipment across country for Amma’s summer tour. We chatted for hours. He was as distracting as the scenery. And over dinner I met a man who was born in the same hospital as I was, in the same year, and grew up about a mile from where I grew up. He kept all of us (you’re seated at communal tables in the dining car, unless you’re a party of four) captivated telling stories about the five years he lived in the woods with his wife and kids after he got back from Vietnam, building a log cabin by hand, going out every day to forage and hunt for their food.

But I do have several complaints about the train, besides these pleasant distractions and beautiful scenery (waking up at dawn to see the silhouettes of palm trees against the golden sky—enchanting!). There is no privacy—every conversation you have—by cell phone (which is frowned upon) and with your seat mates or table mates, is overheard. It is impossible to sleep in a coach seat (perhaps it is possible in a window seat but I couldn’t get the conductor to assign me one despite the fact there were plenty in my car).Of course, there are sleeping cars but they are very pricey, especially for a single person.

In fact, the train discriminates against single people. If you’re a couple, you have seats side by side and can sleep draped over each other. But the conductor sat me next to another single person rather than giving me a window seat because he was “saving” those seats for the couples who might board the train later. Also the tables in the lounge car were reserved for two people, which meant I was scolded for sitting at a table with my laptop. I must admit most people used the lounge car as an opportunity to meet and talk to new people and the most interesting conversations were going on all around me. One woman was practicing her Spanish with a Spanish speaker.

However, I’m one of those introverts who is totally drained by too much socializing. I need my time alone to recharge. So the train is not really ideal for me. Also I am no good without sleep and I’ve never been able to sleep in cars or on airplanes, so it’s likely I cannot sleep on a train, even if I had one of those coveted window seats.

I arrived in Oakland totally fried, way too tired to think. Now it’s two days later and I’m sitting in a charming little coffee shop one block from the Haight and three blocks from Golden Gate park and drinking a great latte (all the lattes in San Francisco are served in glass carafes! very European). And doing all the writing and reading I thought I would do on the train.

Tomorrow night I get back on the train for a 22 hour trip to Seattle. I thought about ditching the train and buying an airplane ticket but I just can’t convince myself to get on an airplane. Not since I’ve seen what it’s like to travel along the ground, seeing the landscape through which you’re passing, the junkyards and the fields of grass, the glacial rivers and the back yards of little wooden houses, elk in the meadows and deer in the woods.