This weekend marks Midsummer, the Summer Solstice celebration.  Pagans of many different types will be celebrating Summer Solstice 2009 in small and large groups across our country.  Because we focus on the Sacred as immanent in our world, everything that exists can be understood as a better or worse manifestation of the Ultimate.  And those things that are most central to life and existence are the most foundational.  Among those foundational things are life and death, duality (without raising one as intrinsically better than the other), sex, and nature.  

Sabbats are our best opportunities as a community to honor these foundations of existence.

To me the Wheel of the Year, and the Wiccan Sabbats that mark its spokes, offer a focused opportunity to meditate about the eternal cycles of life.  Using the agricultural symbolism of earlier Pagan times, our altars will usually be piled not only with the flowers typical of our spring celebrations, but also with fruits and vegetables, tangible evidence of the richness of life. 

These things symbolize the manifestation of our own and all other creative achievements, the first real fruits of life’s vitality, that will culminate in abundance at Lughnassadh, or Lammas, and decline at Mabon.  If you want, this might be a wonderful time to place a symbol of some significant early achievement you have made in your life on your altar.  Perhaps a college diploma or symbol of a first long term job, or something that might be symbolically equivalent.  If you are still young, and nothing of this nature comes to mind, putting something symbolizing an early achievement you would like to accomplish would be good.

Some Wiccans will stay up the night before, as Kipling put it in his Tree Song,

Oh, do not tell the priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But – we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!

A fortunate few will be able to keep a bonfire going through the night, to welcome in the dawn. 

Among Wiccans and Wiccan inspired Pagans, and some others as well, the Solstice marks the highpoint of the Wheel of the Year, the time of greatest vitality for the energy of life.  And like every true high point, immediately afterwards the balance begins to shift. The Sabbats that will follow through Samhain will celebrate the shifting powers of life, harvest, decline, and death.  In some traditions we see this honored through the ritual combat between the Oak King of the waxing year and the Holly King of the waning year.  He brings, the Oak King down at the height of his Power., a fitting symbolic reminder that all power is temporary, all success carrying within itself the seed of its decline.

This year the solstice falls on a weekend, enabling us to harmonize if only for a while our observance of our sacred year with the demands of a society that subordinates everything to the dollar.  Many celebrations will be on Sunday, but some public events will be on Saturday, with smaller celebrations less open to the public on Sunday.  The public ones will usually be announced on bulletin boards in store serving Pagans, especially bookstores.  If you have never been to a Sabbat, this is a nice one to attend for the first time.