Love. A burning slippery slope down to cooling water. Dont forget to enjoy the ride!
In short we will be celebrating midsummers eve here in Sweden. A beautiful celebration of summer solstice. Midsummer is a romantic event when we put flowers in our hair, and dance around a phallic symbol of fertility... or is it a symbolic tree from norse mythology connecting the underworld with the sky...?
Some of the dances are perhaps not so romantic as others, like the little frogs... where we jump up and down in a circle in an attempt to look like frogs.
Passionate, in a less sophisticated way. Play is fun, and children and grownups playing together is really something we could need more of, so I hope we swedes continue to follow our playful tradition inspite it seeming ridiculous in foreigners eyes.
Other melodies of the folkloric melancolic kind including harp and violin, can be so beautiful to listen to during the night when sun never seases to shine, that our hearts burst wideopen from the whole presence of what this symbolically means in our lives, as we romantically decorate our hair and homes with flowers, and collect seven different of them to put under our pillows to dream of our soulmate.
Others never get to experience it, because they had too many ”snaps”, liquor shots, and has long ago rolled down the slippery slope into unawareness and drunkenness.... And they never get to experience the calmness and magic of midnight turning night to day at a moment when day and night is the same thing. That is also part of the midsummerstory. As with everything in life, we experience same events a whole lot different.
Summersolstice and this time of the year is also the time in Christian tradition where we celebrate St John the Baptist, the forerunner to Christ. That is the circle right, We love, we burn, we roll down the slopes, cools and up we go again. And again. Here at Österlen by one of the fishervillages where we buy our herring which is a obligatory ingredient to the midsummer celebration, the poppies bloom on the slopes, adding a sense of burning fire of Love.
As everything in the world, things are a bit upside down in the world now, and the sea is also blooming and burning, and we do not know if there will be any herring for our future midsummer events if the trend continues like it does.
Let us hope this pandemic brings about good changes in the end, and that we may continue to buy our herring in our little fishervillage.
Meanwhile, not knowing what will happen, the best we can do is to continue to play and pray if we can. A little bit of seriousness, a little bit of play and the world goes on.
This is why we Christians love Christ, the tortured man, and God not intervening. In many peoples eyes that is terrible, and completely unthinkable to worship such a God.
But I think it can be compared to why we love the tower in Pisa so much. It is a failure, it is tilted. We can look at the state of the world and ourselves with the same eyes, and give it another chance. Trying to do better this time. Midsummer is the perfect event to try it out. As the earths poles are tilted as much as it is possible towards the sun and we experience more light than normal. That is a good time for Love and compassion, and everything imperfect deserves a little Love dont you think?