The sun sets on midsummer
Endurance, fleeting joy and a welcome coolness
Briefly: Edinburgh Festival appearances on 15th August with Sam Baker and 16th August with Kerri ní Dochartaigh | Catch Kerri’s episode of How We Live Now | Enchantment/Förtrollning is out now in Sweden, translated by Carina Nunstedt - buy it here and listen to me on the Health Revolution podcast
Hello,
On Wednesday, we marked the solstice.
I had wanted to start the day with a dawn swim, but when sunrise is happening at 4.36am, it’s quite hard to muster up the enthusiasm - or, indeed, to persuade anyone to join you. In any case, I had been kept up late the night before by my son, who is already anxious about his new school in September. I did wake at dawn, and wearily said ‘good morning’ to the sun, before falling back to sleep again. The solstice would have to wait.
Midsummer is full of change, and I suppose we all find ourselves processing the changes to come at this time of year. Perhaps I’ll swim in a few mornings’ time, when the tides are more amenable. That will feel like a change in itself. The sea and I have been at odds lately. After months of watching Southern Water release sewage all along my local coast (because: profit), I have lost my taste for it. It seems a little like a hostile environment to me, and that lack of ease - the inability to slip into the space that always quells and heals me - has hung in me like an estrangement. I didn’t realise until this week that it’s something I need to address.
Change is slow in me. It’s a little like turning a tanker. I find I have to set it in motion and then wait patiently for it to happen, and try not to lose faith in the meantime. Since November, I’ve been intending to go and swim in the local outdoor pool, and on Tuesday I finally managed it. I’ve had my swimming bag packed all that time. I just needed to think through the steps before I could manage it. Even then, it took me all day to get in my car and drive down there, and I don’t think I’d have done it if H hadn’t gone with me. Until the moment I got in the water, swimming in a new place seemed like a multi-stage problem that I couldn’t solve.
But once I was in the water, everything was fine. I had my goggles, and my earplugs, and my waterproof sunblock. It was all there waiting for me in my bag, and all I needed to do was to pick it up and drive down the road. I swam the 20 lengths I’d planned, and felt better. It was a fleeting moment of joy, seven months in the making. I’ll do it more easily next time
Maybe I had to wait until this time of year to make the change. Or maybe the discomfort of midsummer finally made me desperate enough. I am not at home in this burning, unruly season. My temperament is pointed towards winter, my true north. I am at home in survival, in grief and remorse, in acts of radical surrender. Summer’s sense of ease unsettles me. It leaves me full of stray energy, writhing and crackling in my veins. I have no wisdom in this season of reaping rather than sowing, of glorious indolence over industrious labour. I can never seem to meet its step.
Without thinking about the significance of the date, I had booked some time with my friend Jo Miller on the day of the solstice. Jo is a somatic therapist who uses sound as part of her repertoire, and immersing myself in the deep resonance of her crystal singing bowls is one of the most restful things I know. Today, I could barely wait to get to her. She had built me a little altar of midsummer flowers, with a candle for each season of the year. Lighting them, I noticed the relief I felt in the wintery months, the sense of homecoming. Summer seemed like none of my business, a season to be endured until I could return to the place I knew.
I lay down, let the waves of strange sound wash over me, and dreamed of the sea. In my mind’s eye, it was big, blousy, turbulent. My body would not lie still. It felt as though something was writhing underneath my skin, something that could not quite reach this old friend that ought to comfort me, but which felt so unreachable. I placed my palms on my chest and felt my heartbeat, a caged animal. My hands burned with its fury. But then I remembered: electricity. It has always been more than a metaphor for me, a very real sensation of something that needs to be channelled and discharged, something that cauterises otherwise. I always did need to be earthed. I pressed my palms onto the floor and felt its full force, a wild, coruscating outpouring through my fingertips. In my mind’s eye, huge, ominous storm clouds rained lightning over the sea.
That evening, we gathered on the beach to watch the midsummer sunset. The air had an underlying coolness, as if a real storm had passed over, rather than just a personal one. At the end of my sound journey, I had thought of bringing flowers to the sea to make a rapprochement at the moment the sun touched the waters. Midsummer is, after all, the feast of St John the Baptist, a day to visit holy wells. If the sea is not my vast, unfathomable holy well, then I don’t know what it is. I imagined myself floating petals out onto the waters as a tribute, hoping that my adoration would be returned.
The last time I was on the beach at midsummer, the whole place was full of people, everyone watching and waiting. On that night, just as the sun was about to dip, a heron landed at the water’s edge, and waded for a while, seeming to bask in our fascination. I’d never once seen a heron in my sea before. It felt as though all reality had been scrambled in that high midsummer magic, and instead of one spectacle, we got another. Tonight, the beach was almost deserted, and I wondered what had happened to all the people who had once gathered in fever. Perhaps I’m not the only one who has fallen out with the sea.
When the sun was just a few inches from the horizon, my friend Hanne and I walked down the water’s edge with handfuls of oxeye daisies and pink roses. We stood for a moment and watched the pinks and oranges of the late evening sky as they blazed across the low, still water. ‘My Mama would have loved this,’ said Hanne, and suddenly the magic scrambled again. When we floated our flowers into the water, we were no longer appeasing the capricious spirit of the sea, but instead sending out petals to meet Hanne’s dear Mama, who might just receive them somewhere over the horizon.
We hugged, and stalked back through the mud to bring our children home to their beds. And, as I find every time the sun sets on midsummer, something had shifted a little, something appeased.
To celebrate midsummer, Anna Brones and I have made an exchange. Over on her Substack, Creative Fuel, she’s hosting a digital retreat, including a writing prompt from me. In return, I get to feature one of her beautiful paper cuts. You can buy prints of her lovely work here.
Free memberships to The Clearing
If you feel like you would benefit from a membership to my community here, but are unable to meet the cost, then you can apply for one of 25 one-year memberships here. As usual, we ask that you only apply through genuine need rather than treating this as a giveaway. We’ll select people at random. More places will be released across the year, so please try again if you don’t hear back from us this time.
Coming up at The Clearing
Events for paid subscribers
Sunday 9th July, 7pm UK True Stories Book Club: Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica in collaboration with Sam Baker’s The Shift
Tuesday 22 August, 7pm UK Creative Questions
If you’re got a problem or query about your creative practice, and you think I can help, send in your dilemma. I’ll pick two people for an in-depth coaching session live on Crowdcast (if you can’t make it there live, no problem!), and I’ll do my best to help you out. We’ll invite your questions in a separate post next month.
Live dates
Tuesday 15th August, 5pm - 6pm UK, A Natural Harbour at Edinburgh Book Festival. Tickets available here.
Wednesday 16th August, 11:45am - 12:45pm UK Wildest Dreams with Kerri ní Dochartaigh at Edinburgh Book Festival. Tickets available here.
Website | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US | How We Live Now Podcast | Live Dates
So much of this takes me back to the Five Element theory of Chinese medicine...the energy of summer; the heat and light that make many people happy and social, but send the rest of us to hide away from the glare and hubbub; the way summer, yang, energy makes many of us feel unsettled: the need we often have to ground ourselves, quite literally. I’m also much more at home with myself and the world in winter. I’m already dreaming of October--maybe I need to head to water as well.
"Change is slow in me. It’s a little like turning a tanker. I find I have to set it in motion and then wait patiently for it to happen, and try not to lose faith in the meantime." Yes — so well said. I'm the same way.
Also, I have made it a goal to get myself into the SF Bay, just to dip, not even to swim, sometime this year. But I had a broken foot and then I was busy finishing my book and I've had a month of medical stuff, and in fact I'm daunted by the whole idea of renting a locker, getting into the water (which is about 15C), bringing a warming beverage, getting out and dressed, etc., and in a busy urban swimming spot. I'll do it, but new complicated things are so hard, just as you've said.