Grief Spells for the Summer Solstice: Being held, spilling over, + becoming libations

Painting by Ashley Blanton, @faint.as.fog

Dear Shapeshifter,

In the Northern hemisphere, as we tilt towards the sun, warmth, light, and rich green spill across the landscape. The days swell.

Imagining this season’s verdancy as the “in breath to winter’s out-breath” allows us to feel the permeability and dance between our hemispheres (Danica Boyce). While we breathe in, the southern hemisphere breathes out.

One spills over as one is spilled into. 

Welcome Summer, Cancer Season, and Tammuz

In European traditions, the Summer Solstice has been a time of fire, water, and plant ritual: celebrating fire and the closeness of the sun; the restoring power of summer rains and those rivers, streams, and tides made warmer by the sun’s rays; and the magic and medicine of plants made especially potent by this season’s abundance of light.

We also enter Cancer Season, the first water sign of the year, whose liminal crab is an ally for when we feel the sanda and tides shifting beneath our feet. Kate Belew shares, “Cancer is the crab, the shelled crustacean that moves between land and ocean, traversing the liminal place in between, intuitively understanding the tides, and stepping lightly betwixt and between.”  

Like a bestie who laughs and cries with you and knows how to make you feel deeply loved and cared for, creating space even for your crabbiness, I like to think Cancer season invites those of us in grief to really sink into what it’s like be held: by bodies of water, by sunlight, by the ecosystems we find ourselves in, and by one another. To turn towards those relationships where we feel embraced as we are, to cast all the spells for collective care, protection, and welcome, to do what we can to build a sense of home together for even those banished and displaced parts of ourselves. 

In Judaism, it is the month of Tammuz, the first month of summer, as well as a time of collective confrontation and mourning.

This period of collective mourning in the heat of the summer predates Judaism. The name of the month, Tammuz, comes from the Sumerian pastoral and vegetal god of fertility and Spring, Tammuz or Dumuzi, who personifies the grain that grows and dies back into the earth with the harvest, and the arrival of the dry season in the heat of the summer.

It is Tammuz’s annual death that was ritually mourned and honored this season with a funeral procession, some versions of which included carrying effigies of his body, made of an assemblage of vegetables and honey, throughout the streets.

The month of Tammuz asks us to make intentional time and space for collective grief.

I am also thinking of Tammuz as a time for not shying away from the discomfort of conflict, because we cannot create space for collective grief, ourselves, or community, without it. I feel closer to embodying this kind of collective bravery when I remember Aleah Black’s (aka Gendersauce’s) words/meme spell: “Heartbreak is the horse, and you are the rider. Go now to the place that must be found.”

And I imagine the place that must be found is not some far off destination elsewhere. It lives here and now, in our capacity to sense ourselves riding together, remembering that “when we grieve collectively, we also generate and catalyze collective power” (Dori Midnight).

Being Held, Spilling Over, and Becoming a Libation

Together, Tammuz, Cancer season, and the Summer Solstice invite us as grievers to see this as a season not only of being held, but of spilling over that which cannot hold us, of becoming libations, and of embracing messier, dynamic and fluid, ecological understandings of ourselves.

Because it is also Pride season, as well as fire season. As hemispheres, we exchange breath.

I’m thinking of the wildfires as dammed grief. About how capitalism and colonialism have tried to dam/n the rivers of the earth as well as those rivers spilling out of us - our grief, our love, our creativity, our self-expression, our desires, our dreams, our strange brilliances.

This season invites us to give ourselves permission to spill over these dams and out into the world.

To spill is to take the risk of assuming a new shape.

To be fluid is to make a motion towards an ecological understanding of the self:

“An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things” - rain, cloud, river–at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that –while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud–when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a ‘cloud’... Resisting definition like headwaters resist pinpointing, we emerge moment to moment, just as our relationships do, our communities do, our politics do… Anything that insists on atomized, competing individuals striving in parallel, never touching–does the same violence to human society as a dam does to a watershed. We should refuse such dams first and foremost within ourselves.” (Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing)

Inspiration for Spilling Over: Page of Cups & the 10 of Swords.

In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, both of the figures in these cards find themselves on the liminal landscape of the shoreline, though in quite different seeming circumstances. 

In the Page of Cups, we see a figure holding up a single cup with a dreamy look, as if toasting to the wonder of the ocean, sand, and sky. I think of the Page of Cups as a gender fluid Venus, soft, sensual, born of the sea, feeling deeply inspired, perhaps channeling something. Page of cups’ energy is all about intimacy, emotions, and their creative potential, and trusting our creative and compassionate impulses. Laeticia Barbier shares, “Cups comment on the emotional realm and imagination, our capacity to create, to love, to bond, and build with affection, and the magical ways we can turn anything into fertile ground with its flowing energy... the power of fluidity." This season, the Page of Cups might be a teacher of the power of a soft kind of spilling over, like the enthusiastic sloshing of a drink, or an intentional pouring of a libation, or the capacity to embrace our permeability. I imagine this Cancerian Page echoing the words of Pinar Sinopoulos-LLoyd: “To the world who only wants me to harden… I will only become softer. In the face of callousness, I rebel with care. To the world who wants me to become harsh, jaded, or reactive, I am hospicing your dying world and co-creating softer worlds. I will let this enchanting world tenderize me.”

The 10 of Swords, on the other hand, is often depicted as a figure laying on the ground, dead, bleeding into the landscape, with 10 swords in their back. This may seem to be an unlikely source of encouragement this season, but I want to reinterpret this dreaded card as another kind of spillage: a dam at its breaking point, and the powerful spilling over of that which was previously held in and held back, as we allow ourselves to overflow that which can’t contain us. Or, the power of truly recognizing our losses. In other words, this card meets us where all is NOT well, and bursts open those floodgates. The 10 of Swords might be a teacher in welcoming the chaos and gushing, wild kind of spilling that is also life. Like water breaking in birth, a poem pouring out in the thick of the night, a relationship spilling out of the shape it once took, a self overflowing a singular or fixed category, a sea of Poppies erupting in a battlefield, or the Stonewall riot.

Both cards, and this season, encourage those of us in grief to allow ourselves to flow, glorious and messy, however softly or fiercely, and remind me of the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estés: 

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.” 

May our grief make us into delicious libations for worlds in which we all belong.

Yours,

Mara

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