🌀SOLSTICE SLOW-DOWN🌞
a quiet note for the sun stand still
This is just quick note from me to wish you the sweetest, slowest Solstice you can possibly muster, whichever hemisphere you happen to be in. I hope wherever you are, however you might be being rushed and hurried along into participating in the potential carnage of this time of year, that you’re able to find at least one deep pocket of calm, joy and quiet amongst it all.
I like to try and pull some writing together for this time of year, but I’m recovering from flu and have been in the grief-trenches again processing the speedier-than-expected death of my grandma in late November. (I fully imagined I would see her over this festive season, so it came as a real shock when she rapidly declined after having not much more than a cold.) I just don’t have many words right now.
There’s been a steady trickle of new subscribers here over the last couple of months, which is wild to me given how little activity there’s been over here from me.
So if you’re new here - and even if you’re not - you might like to read some things I’ve previously written that chime in with this time of year…
OMEN DAYS explores the Twelve Days of Christmas from a Celtic, folkloric lens - a ritual way of relating to the more-than-human world that I have masses of respect for but never have actually managed myself. And this year, I suspect, will be no different!
This revisited version also digs into some of personal experiences of being spoken to by the Otherworlds…
If you’re achingly bored of all the neo-liberal ‘new year, new you’ bullshit (I mean, who isn’t by now?!) you might also enjoy the first half of this wee missive from a few years back. Hell, you might enjoy the second half too? (But it’s the first bit that’s got the good reflections in!)
Finally I’m gonna leave you with two dreamy, pieces of slow-viewing that always bring me a lot of joy at these times of year.
This 1974 BBC documentary, The Mystic Spiral, is one of my favourite explorations into the spiritual and mythic aspects of the spiral. I think I watch this every year around the Solstices - it’s probably now technically a tradition in this household!
(They just don’t make documentaries like this anymore.)
For even slower viewing, this 10min refix of Derek Jarman’s Journey to Avebury with a soundtrack by COIL never fails to soothe me. One for the folks who would love to be at some standing stones at this time of year but can’t find the time or energy (me) or proximity to said stones.
2025 has been a collective shit show *gestures wildly and despairingly at everything*.
Wherever you are may there be love and liberation, rest and reciprocity and every opportunity to go at the pace that your body needs and desires.
I’m massively grateful to you all for being here. Thank you so much for following along on these queer and ever-uncertain trails with me.
More soon(ish).
All my love,
Lottie
Thank you for these wonderful suggestions (especially that documentary!). Sitting in this grief spiral with you with my hands at your back and sending you so much calm, loving energy for these holidays.