Today marks the summer solstice, and the final installment in Nina MacLaughlin’s four part series on the lengthening light.

Max Pechstein, Sonnenuntergeng an der see, 1921

New season. New you. We began in the sky, in the stardust, we moved wombward into the water, out into the earthly world, and we arrive, now, in fire. Happy first day of summer.

The solstice is a special day, irregular, when doors swing open that are otherwise closed, like on Halloween, like the winter solstice and the equinoxes. There are extra layers of possibility afoot. Open yourself, why not, ease yourself toward a more primal state of mind. A battle’s taking place. Twins wage war for rulership over the year. According to the ancient myths, the Oak King has been in power since the solstice in December. Now, after half a year at the helm, he’s sapped. Today, the summer solstice, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky here in the northern hemisphere, the Holly King, the dark mischievous other half, beats his brother, and takes the throne for the darkening part of the year. He’ll rule through yule.

The wheel of the year goes round—round like wreaths hung on doors in winter, round like flower crowns. Two halves within the whole, each force in tension with the other, pushing against, pulling apart, each wanting to overpower its irreconcilable twin. “The very value attached to the life of the man-god necessitates his violent death as the only means of preserving it from the inevitable decay of age,” writes James Frazer in The Golden Bough. “The same reasoning would apply to the King of the Wood; he, too, had to be killed in order that the divine spirit, incarnate in him, might be transferred in its integrity to his successor.” Ritual death, a fertility fest, rebirth. Power rising, taking hold, falling, taking new form. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” says John the Baptist of Jesus, born six months, a year’s half-turn, before him. “You can never have a new thing without breaking an old,” says D.H. Lawrence. “The new thing is the death of the old.” What’s coming?

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In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of.

MAX PECHSTEIN, Ein Sonntag, 1921

The delights of summer are earthly. An older friend lives for pleasure. Just north of sixty, with a thin ponytail and a thick mustache, he does seasonal work, landscaping, collects unemployment in the winter, and pursues the perfect high. After a knee injury, beers and hallucinogens gave way to pain pills. “I’ll die of terminal boyhood,” he tells me.

Another friend floods me with her schedule, her work, her workouts, this kid at soccer practice, that kid at gymnastics, the new dog needs walking, the groceries do not buy themselves, sixty hours at her job, thirty in her car to-ing and fro-ing. “Usually I’ve reached over ten-thousand steps by seven in the morning,” she tells me.

When we were high school, in fits over too much homework, one teacher would stop us mid-whine: “Complaining or bragging?” he’d ask. It’s a question that comes to my mind when my friend enumerates her obligations. Complaining or bragging? It’s a question I try to ask myself at certain moments, too. Is it bad, or are you proud? Is it bad, or do you want others to know what you’re capable of? Is it bad, or is this how you identify yourself? How much does the toil define your life on earth? Now: It’s summer. Time to take a load off for once. The wheel of the year is rolling toward the longest day, a breath of air, a pause. We’re midway between the planting and the harvest, and it’s time for the earth—soil, rain, and sun—to do its work. Can you take rest, can you aim yourself toward pleasure? Or are your work and life too intertwined? In other words, are you the grasshopper or are you the ant?

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In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of.

Max Pechstein, Frische Brise, 1921

We start in the stars and move to the womb, which is to say water, which is to say swimming, which is the best part of summer.

We’ll ease in. On the dawn of the summer solstice, rouse yourself from bed and head to the lawn or the field or the garden, kneel in the grass or the mulch, and with palms open, touch the grass or leaves or petals, get the damp on your hands, and put the wetness to your face. Power lives in the solstice dew—it gives youth, beauty, health, new glow. Especially true for maidens, it’s said, but all can take part. Take a dew bath in the solstice dawn. It makes sense somehow with the residual self-evidence of childhood—oh, of course the solstice dew holds magic—like a belief in fairies or demons. There’s a lot in this world we can’t see.

Dew is the damp left behind as day is born out of night, “a child of moon and air,” according to the lyric poet Alkman, writing in the seventh century B.C. Air and moon mingle and the result is a bead on the grass blade. Haikuist Kobayashi Issa writes:

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet—

Here, the dash is the haiku’s Rorschach test—how does your brain fill in what’s next? This world is real, but it won’t last long. This world exists and yet—we can’t enter it, and yet—we live right in it. And yet the world of dew is not a world at all. And yet what is a world and what are we doing? On the solstice, a baptism with these beads brings renewal, purification, a whole new life. We’re made fresh and ready. When Christianity took sway over paganism, there came a midsummer day, the midpoint between planting and harvest, known as Saint John’s Eve. It marks the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, he who dipped people in the river and washed them of their sin, he who rebirthed people in the water.

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In this series on the summer solstice, which will run every Friday through June 21, Nina MacLaughlin wonders what summer’s made of.

Max Pechstein, Summer in Nidden. 1919-1920

It was early June, Saturday, midmorning on the Red Line. I was moving through tunnels beneath Cambridge when a teenager approached and asked if I wanted to take part in a memory project. Take an index card and a pen and write down a memory, any memory at all, and get one from a stranger in return. I took a card, a pen, and wrote. I handed it to her, and before we reached the next stop she returned and handed me a memory that belonged to another person on the subway car. It was written on an index card folded in half:

On the last night of summer camp, my best friends and I snuck out of our cabins and slept on the tennis courts so we could stargaze and spoon with each other all night. I saw 6 shooting stars that night.

Such is summer. Unroofed, under stars, away from parents, away from rules, pressing against friends, laughing, urgent whispers—did you hear that?—quiet, quiet, earth as bed and sky as blanket. The stars sweep across the sky in silence, heaven’s hemispheric map-makers, time-tellers, their positions revealing where in the year we are.

Where in the year are we? We don’t need to track the stars to know. Here in the northern hemisphere, each evening’s longer light alerts us. Right now the year is skipping toward the opening of the heated season. Which, for some, begins tomorrow, June 1. Where you define the start of the summer depends on whether you align yourself with the meteorological calendar, which is used by climatologists and meteorologists, or the astronomical calendar. If you stand with the scientists, June 1 starts summer (and September 1 starts fall, December 1, winter, and March 1, spring). If you base your seasonal switches on the earth’s tilt and changing relationship to the sun, the solstice opens the season, this year on June 21, when, in the northern hemisphere, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and light lasts longer than any day of the year.

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