🌞 Shining Day | A Solstice Invitation

A ritual gathering of resistance, radiance, and return

“Remember the sky you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is
the strongest point of time.”
— Joy Harjo, Remember

Artist Unknown


I write in Red for the Ancestors.
They are rite-ing the deep.
The troubled.
The oppressed.
The stuck.

Broken down.
Held down.
Kept at bay.

Stories.

There are so many stories resisting.
So many stories suffering.
So many stories breaking.
So many stories grieving.

The sun and all her light makes bright for me each day.
The soul with spirit power brings strength into my limbs.

I dance the stories that are so painful to know,
painful to see,
painful to feel.

I resist dancing some mornings.
It is safer to be in the confine of the head,
eating news,
or randomly eating other stories.

Keep the stories in the head.

But off with her Head, says the Queen of Red,
the Red Queen,
the Queen of Hearts.

Because she knows,
that we need to feel the stories,
we need to tend the stories.
We need to repattern the stories,
and the head alone can’t do all the work.

We are bodies,
grown by sun,
seasoned by cycles,
renewed by rain,
passioned by fire,
alive by breath, air.

Fill the lungs with sun-drenched air.

Artist Unknown

How do we dance the difficult stories
and free ourselves from the pain
of what we are witnessing,
what we are tending,
what we are feeling?

Return to breath.
Body.
Simple things.
Bone.
Blood.
Beat.
Heart.
Stomp.
Beat.

Pumping marrow heart bloodline with my feet.
With the beat.
Beat beat.

Threading the needle with bloodline red thread.
Mending the self.
Stitching the head back together with the body.

Division is an inside job.
There are so many ways to divide on the inside.

Mend the self, mend the world.
Stitch the stories a new pattern,
a new rhythm,
a renewed hope.

Resurrect bone stories.
Scatter seed stories.
Beat the heart alive.

Artist: Josephine Klerks

Awake.

It’s summer sunning time.
Dance time.
Go time.
Celebrate time.
Rise time.

But how can we rise when the oppressors beat the resistance?

Resist the inner oppressor.
Head has a lot of fuel to amplify itself out of balance.

Track the embroidered threads of animism on the earth.
Mycelial networks.
Hawk messengers screeching.
The cat who brings in the fresh kill.
Blood spill.

There is a lot of sacrifice.
Too much sacrifice.
There has been so much sacrifice but not the kind we need.

The body gets sacrificed by the mind every time
we scroll more time than is healthy
versus a walk around the lake.

Sun dance.
Beat the drum.
Boom the body.
Be the oppressor and the oppressed in this dance.
Dance the divide.
Play it out inside the body.
Track the ancestor lines — oppressed and thriving.

Stitch stitch stitch.
Stitching. Stitching.
There is so much weight in my arm
if I stitch too quick.

It hurts to stitch too quick.
It hurts to heal too fast.

Go slow.
Slow down during this heat.
This quickening.
This heat rising.
Bullets flying.
Temperature rise.
Marching rising.
Colliding.
Sun time.

Slow stitch.
Slow stitch.
Slow stitch.
Slow down the stitch.
Stitch what can be stitched.
Thread the needle.
Stitch the slow stitch.
Mend the self.
Mend the weight.
Lift the needle.
Lift the weight.

Discerning threads into the silver eye.
The Silvering I.
Alchemy of Silver.

What is silver?

The silver-haired, silver-boned stories.
The sleeping stories.
The forgotten stories.

Silenced stories turned silver like
glinting fish tails
flashing in water
rippling the streams with renewal.

Passionflower threads.

Artist: Josephine Klerks

Threading the silver needle with tears. Cleansing.
Blue veins.
Red veins.
Making lace.
Stitching the bone stitch stories.

The lightness of bones, rising now.
As feathers freed,
breathing in their return.

Breathing in silver feathers.
Growing wings where my spine bore the weight
of their heavy stories.

Artist: Alexander Yakovlev

The lightness of the needle.
The lightness of the thread.
The lightness of the stitch.
The lightness of mending.

Countering scorch with the sacred.
Holding the tension of flame and water.
Earth and sky.
Bloom and wither.
Too much versus just right.

Dancing the tension.
Making beauty stories in tiny little patches.
Dancing on the rug.
A mandala in the forest.
Resting into beauty during times of chaos and collapse.

---

We move through the Spiral of the Wild Remembering toward the Shining Day of Summer Solstice.
The Mystery of the Sun.
The Great Shining.

Artist: Unknown

Oh, may we shine bright like stars inside the wild deep darkness.

And may we pause, reflect, and wander into the wonder of the still point that is Solstice.

The etymology of solstice comes from the Latin sol (“sun”) and sistere (“to stand still”). During a solstice, the apparent movement of the sun’s path north or south appears to stop before changing direction.

In the Northern Hemisphere, we experience the lengthening of the day — the highest point of the sun at its zenith.
In the Southern Hemisphere, the spiral leads our brothers and sisters inward, into the deep dark depths of fertile darkness, to retrieve the seed of the Wild Remembering in its birthing spark.

Regardless of where you are on Earth, we honor both the light and the shadow it casts.
We cannot know light without darkness.
We cannot know dark without light.
We cannot rise without tending the weight.
We cannot mend without feeling what has torn.

How is the Mystery of Sun — the Mystery of Solstice — seasoning you this Summer (or Winter)?
What is rising in you — and what is resisting its rise?
Where do you feel the weight of old stories, and how might you dance them forward or lay them down?
What wants to be stitched back together — slowly, deliberately — in the gold-thread light of this season?

Let’s enter into the magic of the Shining Days —
when human beings and the cosmos join together in ritual,
to see into one another. True intimacy is Animacy.

Let us become more intimate with the unseen world.
And may the unseen world, the more-than-human world, read us,
story us
as we make new shapes and story new songs of becoming.

Artist: Mystic Mama

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✴︎ You’re Invited

A Summer Solstice Story & Movement Ritual

📅 Friday, June 21
🕰️ 10:30am Mountain Time
📍 Online – hosted through Substack (paid subscribers) or by donation via PayPal/Venmo (email me to receive the link)

We’ll begin with breath and grounding.
We’ll move our bodies in a gentle wave through the elements —
accessible, symbolic, embodied.

We’ll enter into story.
A story of sun, sacrifice, song, and sovereign return.
Of radiance — and the weight it carries.
Of devotion — and the choice to rise, not in performance, but in presence.

We’ll write and move the story.
We’ll listen to optional sharing.

We’ll witness becoming.
We’ll close with reflection and blessing.

Bring a candle. Paper and pen or pencils. Art supplies optional.

A cup of water. Something blooming of the season.

How can you feed the story in advance? Make a mandala on the earth.
Sing the wind a song.
Ask the Sun what it has to say through you.
Dance it. Write it. Paint it. Draw it. Sing it.
Feed the Sun. Feed the Story. Feed the Bloom.