The Afterglow

Yesterday was the longest day of the year — and even at the very top of all that light, I caught myself thinking about the dark.

Not in a sad way. In a homesick way.

We’ve just passed the peak, and some quiet part of me is already leaning toward autumn. Toward the early dark, the lamps on, the deep comfort of my “snow globe.” I’ve never been able to perform summer. I love it, I do. But my body keeps a slower clock, and she is already whispering about hibernation.

Which feels, I’ll admit, a little like a “sin.” We’ve had such a long, slow spring up here — we were still getting frost warnings at night in early June — that wishing away a single warm evening feels ungrateful. It’ll be 40°C soon enough. But it has been a slow roll into the light, and I’ve stopped arguing with my own seasons.

And here is what this solstice has shown me: I am finally home.

Not just in the house. In the life. Over these last years I’ve slowly turned this place into my own retreat — imagine Canyon Ranch in Tucson meeting every woo woman’s sanctuary you can dream up, set down on a quiet stretch of shoreline, and it’s mine. Sacred. Beautiful. Shared with only a precious few. Maybe it was worth the wait.

The long light is generous that way. It falls on everything and lets you see it plainly. And what it showed me this year is how much I built even as a lump on the couch — through that long, blank stretch when I was certain nothing was happening. The foundations were being laid the whole time. The retreat was quietly becoming itself while I sat still. And it told me there is so much more coming. I believe it.

But here is the part I’ve come to love most, and it isn’t the sun at its height.

Last night, the way I do, I watched the sun go down — from my deck above Scubby’s Point — and then I kept watching. Because the sunset isn’t the gift. The afterglow is. Those minutes after she slips below the horizon, when the whole sky goes up in yellow, then orange, then a pink so wild it looks lit from within. It is always better after.

I think that might be the whole teaching. The solstice is the peak — and folded right into the peak is the turning, the slow shortening of the days that has already, quietly, begun. The younger me might have grieved that, or rushed to wring the height dry before it slipped away. The Crone doesn’t. She has learned that the most beautiful light is often the kind that comes after the main event is over. The afterglow. The hush. The walk home in the cooling dark.

Some nights, if I’m lucky, the sky gives more — the Aurora moving green over the water, which up here is always a treat. I don’t chase it. I stay available to it.

So that is how I kept the longest day: not with a fire or a fanfare, but with a deck chair and the patience to stay out past the sunset. To stand in the fullness of everything I’ve made — and to let it begin, gently, to turn. The after will be wild and warm and worth it. And the snow globe is waiting, for whenever the light is ready to fold back in.

* Relevance. Ritual. Rebellion. *

Journal prompt: Where in your life are you standing at a peak — and what would it feel like to stop wringing it dry, and stay out long enough to watch the afterglow?

Thanks for being here. If this met you somewhere quiet, tap the heart — or pass it to a woman learning that the light after the peak can be the best part.