By Fire Well and Tree

  Photo by Simon Berger: https://www.pexels.com/photo/purple-flowers-in-bloom-1353126/ Yay!  The sun is at her peak, and there were some days even in the cooler-than-I-wanted-it-to-be Spring that part of me  doubted we'd get here.  But here we are! A couple of notes. One of the names assigned to this holiday is Liða, sometimes spelled Litha.  I have never known many people locally to call it that (usually Midsummer or Summer Solstice). But if you're going to call it by the Anglo-Saxon name, PLEASE pronounce it correctly!  The "i" is a long e sound (so ee). The ð is called a 'thorn' and it is a hard-Th sound, like "that."  (It's kind of like saying my name with a weird lisp on the 's' really).  I may have talked about midsummer before (sorry to repeat), but it falls between the planting season and the harvesting season. So, really, there's not much to DO besides just maintenance.  If my memory serves, this may have been prime time for

With this "moonth" we are becoming out of sync with the zodiac signs, which is fine, really. It happens every so often.  I haven't checked to see when it syncs up again.  So we are starting with the sun sign in Gemini and then it moves into Cancer on June 21.  We should be finishing up the intellectual, analytical energy of Gemini and then move into riding the emotional waves of Cancer. The new moon is almost exactly at midnight (12:37 to be precise) on June 18. For me, I love it when things line up this way.  For me, a new moon at midnight is an extremely powerful time and I'm going to try to take advantage of it (if I can stay awake). The sun and moon are both in Gemini, as I mentioned.  There's a fusion between external, solar pulls and internal lunar pushes to be analytical and rational about the goal you set or direction you take for this month.  Again, I recommending finding a transit chart (ask me how!) so you can see what house this takes place in for you.

  Lughnasadh 2014 Fire There's some interesting things afoot with the month names for this "moonth."  First, according to the  reconstructed Anglo-Saxon calendar I use , this month is technically Triliða , an intercalary month that seems to appear about every other year, to realign the solar and lunar cycles.  I don't know if it was treated as a time outside of time as Gēola  is, but I'm chosing to treat it that way, and using the extended Summer Solstice 12-day devotional (check under the labels to find it, if I forget to link it). (As an aside,  Liða meant something like "gentle" or "navigable," because the breezes were good for sailing.  It doesn't really mean "midsummer," but is just the month in which the solstice occurs, which is why the name was chosen for the Neopagan calendar.) For the Gaulish Celts, we have Simivisonnos.  According to  some  this can mean "Semi Spring" but our grove translates it as "Midsu