The solstice will come and go this week.

In its original meaning, solstice designated that moment when the sun appeared to stand still.

Or so the ancients thought.

Since midwinter, they’d faithfully tracked the sun’s northward progression. At each day’s zenith, as the sun climbed incrementally higher in the sky, any shadow cast by a protruding rock or a stick stuck in the ground grew commensurably foreshortened.

A primitive but accurate system. But they watched those daily shadow points as the sun edged farther north, slowed…then seemingly paused: solstice! Visible proof the moving sun’s fiery ball had ceased its threatening journey and wasn’t going to keep creeping closer and closer until it burned them to a crisp!

What relief! And one that demanded a celebration!

Say what you will, but my Celtic forbearers certainly knew how to throw a party. Centuries ago, those fur-clad late Bronze-Age kinfolks trekked to the highest nearby hilltop and built an enormous bonfire.

Stags were slaughtered, maybe a few sheep or goats, and chunks of their flesh summarily skewered and propped over the blazing coals. The evening’s cool air carried the heady incense of woodsmoke and roasting meat.

Feasting ensued, including liberal consumption of strong drink. Afterward, they spent the night’s remainder stripped naked, whooping and hollering as they leaped, lurched, staggered, and cavorted around the towering blaze.

A dandy good time was doubtless had by the survivors.

Of course, we enlightened moderns now understand the solstice is only an astro-mathematical marker, a celestial reckoning point which we employ in our endless permutations of timekeeping.

A mere pendulum tock of the eternal clock.

The sun does not journey north and south with the seasons. A fact the old ones, with their rudimentary method of sun tracking by shadow watching, couldn’t discern—or even imagine. But it took centuries to realize the true cause was planetary tilt.

We also had to quell our typical overactive egos. To cease believing ourselves the center of the universe, wherein everything else whirls subserviently around us.

Science eventually helped correct the misperceptions and shed our egocentric notions. Charts of the solar system were duly embedded in our minds. We realized blue-green marble three orbits out from the stationary sun was us, planet earth—home. Though barely a speck; just another grain of sand on an endless beach.

In school, we learned the whirling earth orbits the sun. Spin gives us days, revolutions denote years. Eventually, the teacher would point at those pull-down solar system charts, inviting us to look closer. “See,” they would say, “how the earth tilts?”

Such a seemingly small thing. But wow! That modest tilt of our blue-green planet a few degrees off its vertical axis causes the seasons. Winter, spring, summer, and fall all happen because our spinning, revolving, planet is canted.

“Just think,” a waggish friend once mused. “We owe our sledding and autumn leaves, our wildflowers and days on the beach to being off-center, a tad cockeyed.”

Perhaps there’s a deeper message inherent.…

Regardless, we now understand the physics of the solstice. We can visualize the hows and the whys, its cause and effect. Give me a piece of chalk and a chalkboard and I’ll make it clear to anyone. An orange and a flashlight will do just as well.

The 2024 summer solstice will pass. We’ll savor fifteen hours and eighteen minutes of daylight! The year’s meridian and its longest day.

Summer will officially begin. It’s days stretching endlessly ahead. Lush days filled with sun and heat, as golden-yellow as a stand of black-eyed Susans blooming beside the road.

Fireflies will twinkle in yards and meadows. The season’s first cicadas will begin their ratchety-whirring from the maples.

Anglers will don shorts and sneakers and go wading their favorite creeks for smallmouth bass. Others will spend the sultry moonlit nights tight-lining rivers for flathead catfish, while bullfrogs harrump and great horned owls hoot questions.

There will be ribs on the grill—smoky-sweet, spicy-hot. Sun tea, lemonade, iced coffee. Fireworks next month. And later still, corn on the cob, half-runner beans, and real tomatoes!

No! Don’t try to tell our sun-drenched hearts anything about how all this long and languid interval of warmth and light is nothing more than a by-product of astronomical angles.

Don’t confuse us with facts! Facts are only truth’s chimera.

There’s time for all these things and more, because the solstice has come and time stands still.

Except that time never rests.

Here is where the count begins anew, this time downward. That stationary sun stirs, awakens, reverses, and starts its slow creep south, minute by minute, day by day. Aiming for convergence with its other self, the opposite tock on the far end of the pendulum’s arc.

Our hearts know this, too.

Time flows like a river—sometimes rapid-fast, sometimes pool-slow. Summer’s seeming stillness, its quiet deliberation, is only an eddy, a moment of summary and preparation before moving on.

However, facts can distort the greater truth.

For example, you’ll hear claims that death begins at birth. Yet this twists and ignores the truth that between cradle and grave, glorious life unfolds—with all its loves, joys, wonders, and blessings. To reduce this span to a set of bookend facts—beginning and end—is to deny life’s importance and meaning, missing both story and point. It makes hopes and dreams pointless.

Why say summer’s demise begins at the solstice? Let’s instead speak a purer truth—a truth our hearts know and believe…that ahead, with the passing solstice, stretches the yellow brick road of a delightfully endless summer.

Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].