Summer Solstice 2012

How many wrong notions there are in the world, and along with these the petty greeds and outrageous thefts (including those of mayhem and slaughter). And on more usual, personal levels, the picayune bureaucracies, political/legal quagmires and difficulty of life in general combine to augment a sorry affair. These are what colour modern life in an over all unencouraging sense. As one grows older, we do indeed judge; we have perspectives and opinions that we can no longer simply ignore as we grow less and less intimidated by postures of ‘political correctness’ and the like.

And as one grows older, one comes increasingly to consider what one’s own legacy might become. As the remaining days grow less, each of us will ask what it will be that we leave behind. For myself, I want to bequeath a paganism that is affirmative and commensurate both with the underlying natural beauty of our planet and with the formed aesthetic of humanity’s artistic creations – a paganism that takes us beyond the unpleasant and renders the disappointments, the pains and losses as ephemeral and unimportant apart from as learning gifts. And I use ‘paganism’ deliberately – not as a religion per se but as the generic, natural and folk-oriented spirituality that is closest to our innate reverences, our sense of wonder and our instinctual pursuit of honour and virtue. This is a paganism as the mother of all religions but a mother like the earth herself that is the (perhaps lost) foundation of all effort. She evokes the love each of us has for our own mothers – the maternal lap of comfort and completeness. She loves all her children and is distressed by sibling discord. And she patiently waits for the child to reform, to wake up and return to the warmth of her bosom.

As we grow older, we also come to know by experience, and this in itself is double-edged. We can become more locked into narrow and resentful views – frightened and belittled by what we have known or at least feared; but we also can develop a wider and more detached perspective. We have less of a future in which to be invested. It is probably no accident that among those peoples who are traditionally closer to the earth, the elder retains intrinsic respect; the elder is valued. Mine is not a complaint that we have lost much of that direct understanding in our Western culture; my complaint is that we have lost the time, ability and freedom to cherish that which is already there for us to cherish if we have the eyes and desire for it.

In the northern hemisphere, our solstice is again the two-edged sword. It is the ultimate culmination as well as the beginning of decline. But our warmest days are yet to come, and these are succeeded by our autumnal reflections and followed finally by solar rebirth. In the southern hemisphere of the earth, the whole cycle is reversed so that, as a whole, our planet comprises a dualistic pairing of up-and-down and down-and-up. How sacred this all is. My wish, my wished for legacy, is to help and assist in this recovery of the human appreciation of the sacred in its purest and unadulterated understanding and actualisation.