Summer Solstice

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the official first day of summer (although for me summer starts with the first day of June). Like last year, I decided to commemorate on this blog by uploading a picture of the mystery play my family and I saw at the medieval festival of Visby in Sweden. We visited Sweden a bit more than twenty years ago and I think a lot about my time there these days.But this picture is fitting for the solstice for two reasons: 1) like for the imagery mystery play, Midsummer has roots in Pagan folklore, with its display of fire and demons and monsters, in sum primitive forces of nature and 2) I was never so conscious of summer lights as in Sweden. We visited it in August, but all the same the sun was up very, very late. I never felt as much in summertime as in Sweden that year. it also happened to be one of the warmest and driest they had in history. But in any case, the summer solstice reminds me of this mystery play.