Solstice As Source

A scene that’s etched into my being and the pages of a book, too.

Last year, the summer solstice helped me arrive at the final fresh writing for Climate Wayfinding. As we ride the long light, here in the Northern Hemisphere, I thought I’d share some of those passages with all of you. For me, an indelible solstice scene.

Taos, NM. June 20, 2025.

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From “Journeying Onward”

My last day in Taos lands on the solstice. There is writing still to do, but the body yearns to be one with water. We shut laptops and drive down to a park in the Rio Grande Gorge.

Rivers are known for sculpting the landscape in spectacular ways, but in the case of the Rio Grande, the landscape has also uniquely shaped its course. The river flows through a continental rift zone—an area where the Earth’s outer skin is being stretched and thinned as tectonic plates move away from each other. This particular rift has been opening, ever so slowly, for some twenty-five million years. In a sense, it’s given the river a place to run.

At the end of a dusty road, we come to a confluence. The slim Rio Pueblo de Taos flows from its headwaters at Blue Lake—the sacred heart of the Taos Pueblo homelands—and the even slimmer Rio Fernando de Taos slips in along the way. Here, the waters spill over tan-gray rocks and into the big river, the fleet-footed Rio Grande. Watching their cascade, I ponder whether they will endure the long, parched west flank of Texas and reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Just above the confluence, there is the perfect shallow pool for sitting in cool waters at the year’s height of light. All around us, babble and whoosh, glint and gleam. The pool’s surface is a starry spectacle—the playful collaboration of sun and current.

Along the rivers’ shared edge, horsetail is thriving. Equisetum, I learn, is the only surviving genus of a primordial lineage, profuse during the Carboniferous period (roughly 359–299 million years ago). These reedy plants are a miniature descendant of tree-sized ancestors, the remains of which are abundant in deposits of coal. I learn, too, that horsetail is known for its capacity to strengthen connective tissues, like skin, bones, ligaments. It can help heal fractures and mend wounds.

On this bright day, in this one pluck of the song of life, there is so much everything.

I think of the nodes that we each are—connected through time and space, all contributing their own quiver to Earth, as Earth. […] You, with your tender heart and keen mind and profoundly capable hands, are a wonder. You are remembering and conjuring; you are heirloom and maker; you are an essential part of Earth’s abundance. Let us marvel at what might yet unfurl. Let us find our way in the sureness of knowing love is the mystery and the gravity that holds all of life together.

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Are there solstice scenes etched into your memory, writing, life?

If not yet, there’s still time, and light, remaining. And if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, may you find magic in the dark.

Yours in solstice pause,

P.S. For good measure, an Equisetum extravaganza and a summer solstice playlist.

Sowerby and Johnson (1863) via Wikimedia Commons.