We met again today in The Silver Branch grove. We arrived as we were: tired and very human. How wonderful.
Following on from our exploration of an idea from two weeks ago, the notion of the necessary tension opposites visits us again by way of the Solstice. In the northern hemisphere half of us are preparing to step into the light half of the year while the rest of us are realising only now we never said a proper farewell to our summer as we get ready to reluctantly admit that autumn was its own gift and now our own dark half of the year is about to begin.
My wife and I take a family photo every autumn (that is ‘fall’ for our American friends), lying among the leaves that cover our small back garden in Perth, Western Australia. The last photo below on the right was from just this past week.
Albert Camus said “Autumn is a second Spring, where every leaf is become a flower.”
These are words my wife and I hold very close to our hearts since it is such a profound part of our shared story. We are both divorced, and we had both invested deeply in previous marriages that had consumed the summer of our lives and left us with much food for regret.
This idea of Albert Camus’ about autumn being a second spring, has lived with us as part of our shared mythos, about how we can miss out on the gift right in front of us if we cannot stop fretting and nattering over what has already past and decide how we want to be present and intentional with the unfolding gift around us and the cornucopia of opportunity and possibility in front of us.
It reminds me of a short post I wrote a couple of weeks back.
Live as if you are living life for the second time and you are investing in your ‘redo’ to maximise meaning and minimise avoidable regret, facing everything with the intention to look back on this moment saying: “I was present in that sacred moment, I lived, I chose love and courage.”
Rocco Jarman Instagram
We get to do that all the time. We get to take a tactical pause in the middle of all the clamour, drama and busyness of our lives and adopt the framing to regard this as the second time we are getting to live the upcoming moment, asking ourselves what presence, intentionality and discernment we would like to bring to bear.
Solstice comes from the Latin Sol meaning “Sun” and sistere meaning “to stand still”.
It is a moment where, from our geocentric perspective at least, the Sun seems to stand still in the sky. If the sun were a pendulum, this would be the zenith of its forward swing or equally the nadir of its back swing. Either way, in that moment of suspension we all get to ask ourselves how we would like to close the books on the last chapter behind us, what we wish to carry forward and most importantly what version of ourselves we want to embody as we step forward—what conversation would we like to be having with life in the next arc of our journeys.
In December last year, at the time of the last Solstice I deeply explored this invitation in a long post on Substack. It is a worthy read and is as profound and relevant today as it was 6 months ago.
Solstice: A mythical soliloquy on a brief hanging moment and our relationship with time.
Wishing you all a happy solstice and something of an intentional prosperity for the season to come.
Until next time,
Rocco
