I don’t want to celebrate only the “good” things. Today, the longest day of the year, I would like to celebrate all the times I’ve fallen. I’d like to honor those times (many times) I said the absolute wrong thing. For all the times I mis-stepped and fell. For all times I used words as weapons. I’d like to bow to my pain. I’d like kneel before anger. I’d like to stretch my body out against the earth so I can feel the fullness of this – being human – swell like the tide in my bones. I’d like to let it all rise and fill me. I’d like to be swallowed.

I don’t believe in life without death. I don’t believe in expansion without contraction. I don’t believe in creating without destroying. And so on this longest day, I’d like to honor the night. The tiny summer nights who work so hard to give us the death we need, so that we may live. I’d like to honor what is crying. I want to honor the tension in me that is felt when I reach for what I want. When I begin to expand (and I am certainly expanding) there is another part that is contracting. Old ways, old stories, people who I have loved and love still, they are leaving. As we reach out into life, into sunlight, we are always leaving behind what is dying. And this is grieving.

And so to these tiny nights, I’d like to say, “take me”. Take whatever you want of me. I honor you. You are short and not so dark, but you are powerful. I don’t think I am superwoman. I know that to move into who I’m here to be, I’ve got to give you parts of me. So I submit, because I know you’re wise. And I know that the night never takes more than she needs. She prunes. It hurts. And you grow more blossoms than you knew you had in you.

There is something special, magical, deep about summer nights. There is a way we can give in to them that allows us more light. If we can allow a releasing, a giving away, an offering of what we can no longer use – we can expand even more. Plants do no hold their dead blossoms. They do not clench and strain to keep what was once beautiful. It is dead and it drops. And that is it. New blooms are allowed more food, more vitality, more sunlight. Imagine if we could all drop our dead blooms the moment it is right. We can.

I will say a prayer to this Summer Solstice, and will go something like this… Maybe you will join me:

Let me lay my bones down to earth, beneath sky.
Let my life, my whole life, swell like ocean.
Let my fullness be all here. All in. No part out. I’ll let it rise.
And here, holding everything I am, was, and will be
I give all of it to life and death.
Take it. Take what belongs to life.
Take what belongs to death.
I recognize this isn’t my knowing.
I surrender to knowing that is deeper than me.
So please, with my body stretched out where earth meets sky,
I ask you weave me into death and life,
weave me into who I am here to be.
This is my only offering. This is my only prayer.