Beavi and the Healing Solstice

Firstly, I’ve already written here several times in the last week and certainly hadn’t planned to do so today. I think in the last week I’ve written more articles than I wrote in all of June last year, and to think, when the year mark for this page was coming, I believed I was done with it. I don’t really know that anyone actually reads it, and that’s sort of OK. Part of my devotion and my Work was to keep an ongoing journal to make sense of my practice for all who needed it or would come after me. AFW had kept their page so brilliantly, I felt duty bound to keep mine and not have a Craft that was un thought out or unexplained or unexplored, and so that obligates me to do certain things, like write a shit ton of articles when so many special days happen so thick and so fast. Another problem with this time of year is that these days are all what you would call “moveable feasts” in the old Catholic sense, that is Solstices and Holy Days do not necessarily take place on the same date so they don’t always come in the same order. They just happen around each other, so I cannot say that Extraordinary Time exactly begins with Body and Blood Sunday, and I cannot say it exactly begins with today, which is Solstice, which is what we are discussing.

           

As I was getting up to clean and coming to the laptop to write this, I thought, this is the time of the Golden Lantern and the Golden Castle. For anyone who has followed this page, you will note here a change. So much of my iconography I took from AFW, but when it became my own it had to fit my reality. It had to change. And even my own iconography had to change as it settled into itself. The Golden Castle, which stands in the northeast at Candlemas makes little sense ot me there. It seems that at the beginning of spring it is the Stone Castle for me, and it is only now that I have begun using the Golden Lantern again, so now I know its time for the Golden Castle, and for Golden Lady, Beavi.

There is a half done sculpture of a woman in a flame colored dress. I began making her today and didn’t even think about this being the Solstice. Somehow this unfinished woman has something to say to me. I went to bed with teeth unbrushed and dirty dishes in the sink. I am getting up at five thirty in the morning to grey light and the name Beavi is on my lips. She is the Finnish Goddess of the Sun the Sami offer butter and white animals to in the winter. She is the mother of the shamans who prefigure Santa Claus and she and they bring the gifts of sanity and healing in the darkness of winter. But the thing we have always known is summer, with its great heat, and its drying grass carries its own need for sanity, and this is a time for Beavi more than ever. Perhaps the reason the Solstice is not revered like other holy days is because we want to pretend that this is the time when life is the happiest and all we need is the beach and water even while so many of us cannot easily get to the water and the heat of the sun drives us indoors.

But for those of us who can make it to the sand and the water and the healing of summer it is good to remember this healing is not an entirely secular one, That is why I am not going to call Solstice Litha. That always bothered me. I don’t know what the hell a Litha is anyway. To me this time is Sol or Beavi and I remember the Woman fo the Sun and ask for her blessing. We need it so badly. Look upon us in our madness, in our sadness, in our poverty, in the wealthy we do not yet understand or appreciate, in our need to change. Shed the light of your grace and sanity upon us, o lady.

The summer has always been a strange time of transition. I went from years of school to years of teaching in school, so summer has always been the time of rest and no work, but that’s also made it a time of watching money or watching there be no money. I’m so used to the poverty that even when I’m not impoverished I have a hard time believing it. Summer was the time of desire, when I wanted to travel but usually couldn’t, when I wanted to get to he beach, but couldn’t find a way, when I wanted to be cool, but could not get out of the heat. It was the time when I failed a load of high school courses and spent the entirety of summer school, an experience that was strangely joyful at the same time it was a bit of a punishment. It’s always been a liminal and bittersweet time, and it is a time of memory. Summer is the time of some of my keenest joys an also the sharpest sadness. It was the heat of July that I first spent a series of days dedicating myself to the Craft, took a bath, donned a black robe and turned by back on normal life. It was the first time I wen to Michigan City and came into contact with the sadnesses and poverty of so many people and began writing my cycle of poems dedicated to an old lover now in prison, who had become my lover, yes, in a summer time.  It is not that I remember friends who, far from living it up, are homeless, or in jail, depressed, afraid,, bedeviled by madness, truly in need of Beavi.