Solstice

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In a field at sunset — Sunday 21st Jun ‘26

The last pages of this notebook. It feels appropriate that this notebook should end on the solstice, because quite a lot of things in my life seem to be ending at the moment. My flat is changing as someone who used to be very close to me moves their last things out of it. The company I work for has collapsed, and I am out of work. And now this notebook is finished too.

It all feels very significant, which is why I have come to sit in this field on my own and watch the sun set.

I don’t know much about the solstice now I think about it. I know it’s the longest day of the year, I know that the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, and I know there is something with Stonehenge where everything lines up properly. That’s about the limit of my solstice facts.

I guess there was once a practical importance to all of this, the solstice helped people understand where they were in the year. It told them about crops and seasons and what needed to happen next. I have no need for that, obviously. We have (mostly) willingly relinquished our relationship with the solstice as our way of marking the passage of time. We have clocks and calendars and electric lights and big tractors now. Most of us can go through the longest day of the year without really noticing it.

I guess all that remains is some vague collective memory of significance. The knowledge that, for a very long time, humans have used this day to mark where they are in the year, and more importantly, a turning point.

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I suppose that’s what I like about the solstice. It’s not just a day for endings. It’s a day for rebirth and renewell (I think I’ve spelt that wrong).

Some things in my life are ending, but I don’t want to think of myself as standing among the wreckage of them. I would rather think that I am a turning point too. That there is a space opening up where these things used to be, and that I am responsible for how I tend to that space, and what I allow to grow there.

As I sit here watching the sun dissappear over the horizon, I can’t help but feel connected to all the people who have sat and watched this same sun fall below their own horizon. What they were losing, what they hoped might begin, what questions they were asking themselves about what came next. How many of them were also standing at a turning point, trying to understand what they should leave behind and what they might make space for.

That is a very sappy thing to write, but I AM a sap as it happens, I enjoy having moments like this. I think awe is a very important emotion to cultivate. And it’s hard not to feel awe when I think about the unimaginably long line of people who’s lives, loves, losses and accidents have all led to me being here at all.

A relationship has ended, a company has collapsed, a notebook is finished, and I am still here, lying on the grass, watching the longest day come to an end x