Midsummer/Summer Solstice

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S4E20 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonders Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, mark, and I'm Yucca. And today we're talking about the summer solstice, the longest point in the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The longest day, the shortest night, and we're gonna talk about what that is, what we call it, what some of the metaphorical themes are that go along with it, and some ideas for rituals to do for the, for the summer solstice.

Yucca: Right. And it's another one of those that has a lot of names but at least being one of the solstice, we have a name that. That is pretty common that we could refer to it by, and most people know what we're talking about, right? Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. For many, many years, this was referred to in the English speaking world as mid-summer.

Mm-hmm. So that's where you get a mid-summer night's dream, all that kind of stuff. And that's what I prefer to call it because I don't like using the, the foreign language names since I've not.

Yucca: They aren't your languages.

Mark: Yeah. And I'm not drawing cultural elements from those cultures, so why should I take their name?

Yucca: Right? Mm-hmm. Right. So you'd like to call it mid-summer. Are there any, is that any other names? Southern

Mark: Hemisphere, in which case I would call it

Yucca: mid-winter, right? Yes. For us it's usually summer solstice sometimes refer to hafmas. Haf is summer in Welsh, and it's actually a name we made up because the moss is like the, like from the other side of the year, and it's the flip of that.

And so it just kind of sounded nice to us. We're like, oh yes, it's the summer, it's the summer muss, right? Mm-hmm. So we call it that or it's our. First summer, it's not midsummer for our climate. Mm-hmm. You know, that some climates It is. I mean, summer has started, I know in the, on the mirror, the calendar here in the United States, it's the official start of summer.

That's right. Yeah. But. Climate, I mean, weather-wise, summer is here already for us. Mm-hmm. It's just not the middle of summer. The middle of summer won't be until August.

Mark: Right. And, and that's true for us too. I wrote a blog post at atheopagan dot org recently about the fog cycle. Because here in, in the coastal zone in Northern California, what happens is it gets blazing hot inland, like in the Sacramento Valley.

Mm-hmm. And the air rises and therefore creates a low pressure zone. Mm-hmm. Because it's expanded. And so it pulls cool moisture laden air in from over the ocean, which precipitates out into fog along the coastal area. Mm. So we get this fog cycle and it's why San Francisco is famous for fog. We get this fog cycle in the summertime and when the fog cycle starts.

It's really kind of the climatic beginning of summer, and that's been going on now for about three weeks. Mm. Okay. And what'll happen is we'll have these gray days never rains, just gray, overcast, and then eventually, It cools down enough that that thermal cycle doesn't work anymore. Mm-hmm. And we'll get a few days of bright sparkling sun, usually some blazing heat at the end of that, and then it starts the cycle

Yucca: again.

Okay. So nice.

Mark: That's, that's how we know that summer has started here. Mm.

Yucca: I like that. Well, for us, we have them monsoons. So in the desert southwest, much of the desert, Southwest has the monsoons, and we've been getting them this year, which is wonderful because we've had quite a few years of, of just not getting, just being in terrible, terrible drought.

Mm-hmm. And it's. When I was a kid, the monsoons started earlier, right? They started back in May and they went all the way through September. But now they really are the end of June, July, August is when they'll come and it's we'll get the afternoon rain heavy, rain intense, and then it's gone. But when the rain is coming in, there is.

There's the smell of the rain. Yeah, and it's the soil. I think that what's happening is there's soil microbes that are, that are releasing the smell. There's all sorts of things, but it's just, there's nothing like the smell of the rain. And I've, I've been in different areas, different deserts have their own.

Smell, but there's something similar between them, right? If you're in the Chihuahua or the Mojave, like they have their own and it's just the most wonderful thing. There's just nothing like it. And right after the rain, there's so much life that just wakes up. We have mosses that go dormant and then it rains and they wake up and they're, this fairy green just pops of fairy green everywhere.

And then a few hours later they're back to the brown. And it just, everything wakes up in a way that that is just very different than the rest of the year. So it's just wonderful. And the insects. And one of the really fun things that we love is that after a rain, a day or so after that is when the winged ants will come out.

Oh, so they send out that generation because they need the soft ground to be able to start the next colony, and it's too hard to to dig any other time. So that's when you'll see just these, the conventions, these parties of the wing dance. And you know, some of the termites do that as well. And it's just, Alive with insects and creatures, and it's just a very magical time of year.

Mark: And there's all then the dramatic lightning storms that come with the rain too.

Yucca: That's right. Yeah. And the clouds, the, the incredible, the thunderheads. Yeah. What is it, CU Cumul. Nimbus, is that what it is? Those ones that just go literally miles into the sky and it's amazing. Yeah, no,

Mark: and what I have enjoyed when I've been in the desert Southwest at this time of year is that typically, The rains will break right before sunset.

Yes. So you get these spectacular sunsets, just unbelievable kind of blazing through the remnants of the clouds. Mm-hmm. Really

Yucca: extraordinary. Yeah. And most the sunsets all year round are beautiful, but as we go deeper into summer, the late summer, early fall is when those sunsets are. I don't know why. I don't know quite what's happening.

That's different, but they're the ones where the whole sky is just red and golden and mm-hmm. It's just, and they seem to, to last a little longer. It's, it's quite amazing. Hmm. So enchantment. Yep. So that's what's happening for us. This is a great time of year. Yeah. And it's not too hot yet. Uhhuh, it'll get a, we don't actually get that hot.

Really. We're, we're fine in terms of heat, but you know, we're, we'll be in hanging out in the eighties, so Uhhuh.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most of the warm days that we get are low nineties, but, You know, some, sometimes when the fog cycle really breaks hard, we'll have days that are, well, we had a, a day that last

Yucca: year, you had crazy

Mark: 15 last year.

That was for about a week we had temperatures that were up mm-hmm. Over 110 every day. And that was, that was amazing. Yeah. So, mid-summer. Yeah. And and the summer solstice. What are the kinds of things that we think of thematically that go along with this time of year? I mean, we've, we've talked about what's happening in nature.

Mm-hmm. We still, by the way, our birds still have their mating plumage, which is interesting. It seems a little late to me, but they do, I'm seeing that at our

Yucca: feeders. Ours too, as well. Although ours are always, we're a little later. Than you because you warm up so much sooner than we do. Right. So there's still and I, I feed mine meal worms and I see that they're still gobbling up the meal worms as we get later into the summer.

They'll kind of leave that alone. But I put out like a little bowl for them to, to and so I assume that they're always doing that when they've got the eggs or the real young mm-hmm. The young birds in the nest. So that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Our hummingbirds are mostly …