Last weekend was solstice, and for those of you that don't know, it's the magical holiday when days are the longest in the northern hemisphere, and nights are the longest south of the equator.
I did a magical ritual with a witch that I've been celebrating solstices with for the last 20 years. We're dear, dear friends, but very different people. She has a deep artistic bent, and loves crafts. She always has beads and glue and goo and weird paints. I…don’t.
When she texted me last week to say, "I will bring crafts for Solstice," I texted back, "Why do you hate me?" As we were bantering over this on Saturday, which is not the day we usually celebrate but the day we could celebrate this year, she said cheekily, "It's called witch-craft, haha." I'm like, "No, in Spanish, it isn't."
Anyway, attached is a photo of the craft that she "made me do" for Solstice. It was, as always, a fabulous ritual. It really did allow me to connect with playful parts of myself that are not as readily available during daily life, and I just took the time to pause and enjoy the sunshine.
front and back of my painted rock masterpiece
That would have been good enough, but then the next day, the unexpected magic happened.
I went to see live music at an outdoor venue, which is one of my favorite things to do. At one point, the singer, who seemed very witchy to me, told the crowd, "We're going to do a ritual together," and so she instructed everybody to visualize all the troubles, the stresses, the pains, the conflicts, the challenges, the frustrations that they've been carrying around, and to let them go in a wild howl, a primal scream that echoed for a couple of minutes.
It was so powerful because how often do you have 10,000 or 15,000 people in a ritual, whether or not they know that that was what was going to happen? Hearing us all scream at once and encouraging each other to keep going was fantastic. When the energy settled down, a guy standing next to us commented, "That was so much better than therapy," and he's not wrong.
Collective ritual can really change things quickly for people, and even if we don't remember to partake as often as we would like, it really inspired me to see that everyone can bring magic into their lives through:
- cooking, if you're the one feeding yourself and the people you love
- gardening, if you've got a patch of dirt and a few seeds and some patience
- driving, if your commute is the only quiet you get all day
- getting dressed, if you're choosing what armor to put on before you face the world
- cleaning the kitchen, if that table is where your whole family actually lives
- lighting a candle at dinner, if dinner is the one time everyone's in the same room
- making the morning coffee, if that first cup is your one reliable ritual
- performance, if you happen to be a pop star or a rock star (most of us aren't, but somebody is)
This week, write down three examples of how you could make your life a little bit more magical, and then make sure that you actually do it. The most important thing to know about magic is that it works all of the time, but only if you work it, so go work it.
Happy Solstice, everybody!