This long night is your time too. This long night/these longest nights of the year help you to note the greater movements, the turning of the sky wheel one more day forward. You know it in your bones—how the Sun gets incrementally longer in the sky from this day onward until it comes to its furthest point on the Summer Solstice.* Each year since before reckoning it has been so.

You are part of this movement now—this growth of light. Whether conscious or instinctive, it is true every year. Oldest of the welcomes, honoring dawn. Great miracle of return. Continuing the blessings.

Do you light a fire? Make a sacred table? Bake bread and sweet cakes? Decorate the doorway with fragrant boughs. Unpack the weighted fruitcake. Quaff the ale and remember ages past. People have been gathering for ever. Meditate and join with the unseen masses. What is your way?

Whatever you do, even for a moment of thankfulness—do it, dear Ones, in gratitude for your life and breath. For your ability to notice. The light as it returns.

Your ancestors took fire and sequestered it, held it through the long night to symbolically bring it out again in celebration of this moment. Do you know that Solstice is the same moment everywhere on Earth? That moment when the Sun is at its farthest point south, stations, and then moves again precisely in its long arc across the sky.

Our wish: In a silent joining, in that moment, everyone on Earth can be aware together. You are One on Earth. You can feel this and know it as true. The Heart of Gaia, your hearts, at One.

This Solstice is only on Earth, your Gaia, your blessed planet. Only you as her children of light can notice, can honor, can take joy. Do it with your full hearts. Do it in simple gratitude, for your life.

We bless you in this time.

We bless you in your knowing.

We bless you in the light.

* These words and vocabulary for the Northern Hemisphere.