The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

Summer solstice musings on death, loss, and transfiguration.

I have no ritual for you this summer solstice—just life.

Summer solstice is traditionally one of the most significant points in the year to recognize for me, and though I may have carved out no time to be “intentional” about it, its energy hit me like lightning, nonetheless.

Sometimes we do not create ritual so much as it creates us, shapes us, remakes us and takes us into places we had not planned for and may not be ready to go.

We call this ritual life.

Summer solstice is the longest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere that is June 20th, just a few days ago, a few days that feels like a lifetime to me.

Symbolically, summer solstice represents the peak of the lights’ ascent. However, symbolically and mythologically, the story of old is told as a clash between the Oak Kind and the Holly king, the god of summer and the god of winter. This “changing of the guard” is symbolic not only of nature’s transitions but our own as well—the Dark and the Light shifting and swirling within us taking turns taking the lead, moving from the position of prominence. In this clash, the Oak King succumbs to the Holly King only to be born again at winter solstice with the “return of the light”.

Is it odd that the zenith of the Light’s expression is also the harbinger of the return of the Dark? Not at all. This is the movement of the sacred spiral—one position giving way to the next in an endless dance that rises, falls, succumbs, composts, and rises again.

The zenith of summer is inextricably intertwined with the winter inevitability and here in Montana our weather is happy to remind us: “Winter is coming.” Our temperature sits in the 50’s in my little mountain town on summer’s day and winter storm warnings abound in the higher elevations.

Seasons as feelings intermingle: sharp, blurred, layers upon layers twisting into something utterly natural and entirely untamable.

I feel Her—the Dark. She is already whispering at the edges of my psyche as She always does. She is the one whom I speak to in ritual, who I feel most at home with. It is in the soil that the majority of my own growth occurs. Below the ground an invisible yet palpable deepening.

I identify strongly with Persephone and Eleusinian mysteries whose rites are celebrated at the equinoxes. I especially feel called to Demeter’s expression of the story these days as her search for her daughter mirrors that of my own. I am no longer a maiden, but a mother in Her fullness: body, mind, spirit, and commitment.

My ritual at present is dancing with the art of and in the fires of confrontation. To do this with grace, compassion, and a contained type of ferocity is my alchemy, specifically in regards to my own daughter even as I drop a layer of the mantle of “daughter” and become something else.

The art that must be practiced now is subtle and patient, waiting for the moment, the hour, in which the whispers in my heart and plans from my bones form my ancestors become words and actions. Enfolding that dance, though, is the uncontrollable the inescapable. The timeless call that says, “It is time.”

Death is here.

It neither feels like summer outside my window—dressed in gray and dripping with June’s tears tinged frosty—than it does in my heart. Pulsing. Alive. Tense.

Waiting….

Only waiting no more. Succumb to inevitability.

Relief.

There is more—more than holding my lineage precious and in a protective embrace, more than laying claim to my rights as a matriarch. There is more than the endless needs of small bodies and the yearning to find time to create, to write, to clean, to see clients, and tend to students and create courses and continue to eek out a living and make my way through the world in the only way I know how.

The King is succumbing.

In truth, since first beginning this piece, he has.

He is gone.

My dad is gone.

His passing hit me like lightning a few months ago—the knowing, the imminence.

One of the most prominent figures of my life has faded, wilted, and lies composting as I sit listening to bird song and feeling the tenuous rays of summer tease the growing things to life.

Death has struck like lightning in my life. The Oak King has fallen. That which cannot bend will inevitably break, but all things will also eventually fall and fade.

And so…

So, I guess I do feel the symbology imbedded in solstice—more so, I am living it!—but it does not make me want to dance around a bonfire or strip my to my waist and bare my breasts in joy at the wild. It makes me want to shred my hair instead, to howl into the void the absence and care of the Father—of my own for too much of my life, of the wider embrace of He who is supposed to shelter, protect and guide us but has been turned into an absentee parent who sacrifices his own children instead of himself.

This is not about the toppling of “the patriarchy”, though it could be, but about the tumbling, the graceless careen off the cliffs into a free fall of my personal patriarch—my father.

Death lurks. Like the Dark She will claim what is Hers—She has now—and no bargaining or begging for more time, more days, more skills, or mechanisms to defy or even halt Her march will deter Her. It didn’t. I didn’t even try. If anything I begged Her to take him. To end his suffering, to end mine.

And She did.

So, no, I do not have songs of summer for you today. I have Death dribbling down my windows. And though those dreary tears will soon recede and all of life will twirl into harvest, something is already rotted on the vine and there is no redemption, only compost. Compost that lies cold, waiting for the fires that will consume an empty flesh suit.

And a spirit that has soared beyond it.

Thank Gawd.

The King has fallen…. long live the King.

I am rocked and blank and numb and relived right now and as the feelings and words become more rooted, I will share much more on this subject—my father’s passing.

For now, thank you for reading. Thank you for respecting my grief and the layers of feelings that accompany it. This is another beginning even as he—my dad— “falls” something in me rises.

I can feel it!

Vajra Vilasi!

Love,

~Justice