It has been six months since we celebrated our first Gaian Festival of Light and Wholeness together in December of 2021. Lorian members of the Gaian Commons Community from both northern and southern hemispheres gathered on Zoom to honor the Winter and Summer Solstice together. We created Spirals of Light, either out in our gardens, or inside our homes on floors, tables or altars. In the northern hemisphere, our spirals were the traditional evergreens or beautiful stones, beads–whatever we wished to create. Our gesture was to spiral inward to light our candles from a single source at the center, honoring Gaia’s greatest in-breath, the cold and darkness of winter, and the longest night. At the same time, in the southern hemisphere, we created spirals from blossom and flowers and summer greenery, walking out of the spirals with our candles already burning, to honor Gaia’s greatest out-breath and the longest day of heat and summer light. At our December gathering, we walked our spirals meditatively together, pausing at the end to honor the sacred stillness of Gaia’s breath uniting us.
In March 2022, we gathered once again on Zoom to celebrate the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox together. For this festival, we created a lemniscate pattern for the time of equal day and equal night. It was inspiring to discover that walking this figure eight pattern created a natural embracing and widening gesture, with a potent pause of sovereignty and balance in the center of the lemniscate loops. We experienced together a moment of peace and stillness that echoed the Solstice stillness, but held a deep equilibrium unique to the Equinox time–one that embraced and united us throughout the Gaian world in its strength and potency and power.
Now we find ourselves once more at Solstice–the Gateways of greatest Light and greatest Darkness. It is June, 2022, and at this turn in the Earth’s wheel, we are celebrating Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere, and Winter Solstice in the southern hemisphere. It will be interesting to experience the opposite mirroring gestures of what we initiated and celebrated in December of 2021. We have the opportunity to contemplate all that has happened to us and in our world since we last walked a spiral, and we can discover who we are now in the present moment. We can breathe with Gaia, be Gaian, as we pause once again in sacred stillness and celebration of life together across the globe.
We will be celebrating Summer and Winter Solstice together via Zoom on Sunday, June 19th, 2022 at 1 pm PST. All are warmly invited (membership in the Gaian Commons Community required).
Whether you join us that day or not, we invite you to create your own Spiral of Light wherever you are, to honor this Solstice time, and to cultivate a new Gaian Festival of Light and Wholeness in your lives.
A Shared Spiral Ritual
Creating a spiral, whether for yourself, or together with family and friends, can be a creative, fun and meaningful ritual in the days or weeks leading up to Solstice. In the Southern hemisphere, creating a spiral of winter greens can be beautiful, as it invokes the age old meaning of bringing green life back to the barren land of Midwinter. For the Northern hemisphere, creating a spiral from all the beauty and life of summer’s bounty–flowers, blossoms, herbs - would be a wonderful thing to do with family, grandchildren and friends. Use your imagination to create what works for you. If making a large spiral to walk is too much, create one from sand on the beach, or stones from a river. The possibilities are endless!
Have fun with this. Perhaps the spirals you create could honor the four kingdoms of nature–Earth, Water, Air and Fire, and the elementals representing these kingdoms – Gnomes, Undines, Sylphs and Salamanders. Midsummer’s Eve/Day June 23/24th in the Northern hemisphere is a traditional time (linked to Summer Solstice) to commune and make merry with the faeries and elementals of the land where you live. Lucinda Herring will share about this at our June 19th gathering. Ara Swanney will share about the traditional Maori festival of Matariki (meaning Pleiades) a new year’s celebration held in New Zealand near the Winter Solstice. This year, Matariki coincides with Midsummer’s Day, June 24th in the Northern hemisphere, which is a special alignment.
Festivals are living gateways in the Earth’s year, liminal times where we can connect more deeply with our selves, and with the seen and unseen realms of Gaian life. The spirals we create can be gifts to our homes, land and place. They can serve as focal points and an invitation for our local nature spirits, house angels, genius loci of land, unseen allies and Sidhe companions to join us in our preparations and celebrations. Such co-creation is a Gaian work–reweaving the web of life as the wheel of the seasons turn, and cultivating joy and lightness of being for troubled times.
You might wish to wear something festive or representative of the Solstice season you are honoring. Please bring a candle, as we will be using these in our ritual time together, and, if you wish, something seasonal and festive to drink and eat. You might also want to bring a spiral you can trace with your finger, if you want to include a bodily gesture, or you might create a spiral in the room where you will be, to actually walk during our shared meditation.
Our Solstice gathering will be the third exploration of what it means to create new Gaian Festivals for this time of great transformation and change on our planet. We welcome your presence, either at the Sunday gathering, or in your feedback and sharing online, for each of us holds a unique and valuable perspective and understanding of these questions:
What does it mean to celebrate the Solstices and the Equinoxes in a Gaian way?
How can we “think like, breathe like, be like our beloved planet,” not only at festival times, but in every moment of our lives?
How can we cultivate joy and sacred wholeness, in service to life and to our world?
Download How to Create a Festival of Lights Spiral Ritual below for more specific instructions and inspiration.