Summer Solstice Festival

Let’s gather together to celebrate the summer solstice at the Forest. The summer solstice is midsummer, when the sun is at its highest peak in the sky. It’s the longest day and shortest night of the year, the tipping point to the downward path to the dark, nourishing rest of winter. Now the power of the sun begins to wane and the days grow shorter and the nights longer.

The sun has bathed the earth in its warmth, heating up the soil so that when autumn rolls around, we’ll have a rich and bountiful harvest. It’s a time of celebrating the fullness of life and being grateful for the abundance in our lives. It’s a time of celebrating our own inner radiance, power, beauty, and the work of our hands.

This is the midpoint of the growing season, when life is at its peak. There is an energy of abundance all around in our natural world.

The summer solstice is also a time to rest, especially in a culture that encourages us to be constantly in a summer season in our lives, constantly productive, working, growing, being fruitful, and burning our power. Together we’ll hold this space of rest, of learning to conserve our energy and not burn it completely out, of balancing the intensity of heat and fire with stillness.

We’ll come together to:

• Hold sacred ceremony for this threshold of the year.
• Practice gratitude for the abundance in our lives.
• Cook a festive meal together and enjoy our summer bounty.
• Pause for individual periods of silence.
• Collaboratively create an outside nature mandala on the Forest floor with leaves, stones, sticks, feathers, or other elements we gather from the forest land.

If you’d like to experience the summer solstice with us on the actual date of the solstice, Thursday, June 20, we warmly invite you to add an extra night when booking.