'The Heart Of Summer'

The Wheel of the Year — the eight-point Celtic calendar of sabbats — marks the Summer Solstice as Litha: the moment of maximum light. But it is also the turning point. From this day forward, the days shorten. The sun is at its strongest, and the year has already begun to remember darkness. The Celts understood this not as loss but as completion: the peak is only the peak because it is already the beginning of the return.

Shakespeare set A Midsummer Night's Dream on Midsummer Eve precisely because this was understood as the night when the veil between worlds was thinnest — matching Samhain at the opposite point of the wheel. The fairy world was accessible. The ordinary rules suspended. In the heart of summer, anything could happen between dusk and dawn.

This is for the woman who knows how to inhabit a peak — fully, without grasping at it.