The Old Farmer’s Almanac states that Summer 2025 begins on June 20th, 2025, at 7:43 PM PT, marked by the Summer Solstice. This marks the longest day and shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, traditionally an occasion for scorching one’s brisket and baking one’s biscuit by leaping over bonfires in celebration.
Early humans kindled ritual fires to honor the sun at its most potent, the star literally worshiped as a god by agrarian societies everywhere. Remember, no sun, no food, even if your diet is strictly Paleo. Wild protein sources like deer, bunnies and boar nibble truffles and tender greens, while more omnivorous fish and fowl feast on plants, as well as munching smaller creatures that eat plants. So, sun, photosynthesis, and – wait for it – bees – are always part of the survival equation on Earth, unless you are a micro-organism.
Druids — yes, they’re still around today — call the Summer Solstice Alba Hefin, or “the light of the shore,” while Wicca people use the Anglo-Saxon term Litha, perhaps because Litha is easier to spell and pronounce than the Celtic term Grianstad an tSamhraidh, which means “sun-stop.” Another Celtic doozy: “Oidhche Fhéil Eoin.”
Many Irish speakers dismiss the Germanic term Litha as twee, Anglicized New Age “bollocks” since the hierarchical, patriarchal Germanic invaders loosely known as Angles and Saxon are the antithesis of the floaty, lyrical Celts.
The Irish celebration of Summer Sosltice was lit by fire to fend off pranks and worse by the supernatural. Stories abound of fairies luring farmers into their caves, never to return. It was said that at the deep cave of Castel Cor, a white cat guarded treasure there throughout the year, a feline which during Midsummer assumed feminine human form and tempted lads into all manner of mischief.
A bit closer to the bone—some say bonfires were actually called “bone”-fires, since bones were burned, although others cite “bon” as in “good” as the etymology — the Gaels celebrated their matriarch Queen Áine at midsummer, whose name means brightness or shining. Symbolized by a red mare, or cloaked in swan feathers, with fire, fire and more fire, her worship was crowned by blazing peat fires set on hillsides visible for miles in those days of low-profile building.
Female elders circled the fires tree times “sun-wise” on their knees, asking that the village be blessed with a new year free of famine or plague. Giant wooden wheels were stuffed with straw, then set ablaze and rolled down hillsides, symbolizing the turning cycle of the year itself. Fields were torched, and the resulting smoke and ash were wafted over herds and flocks as a petition for fertility.
Burning hazel twigs were used to singe the backs of cattle to further seal their protection. Pregnant women walked through the embers to safeguard their precious cargo. After midnight, families took glowing chunks of smoldering turf to their homes, using them to ignite sacred fires in their hearths, and the ashes were later mixed with seed-corn for the following season’s planting.
Although our own family genetics place us about 4,000 miles or more from the Emerald Isle, imagine our recent delight in finding ourselves ensconced in the airy studio of a South Pasadena anam cara where two members of the Celtic musical trio The Stepwise Band favored us with some lilting (fun fact: “lilting” in this context is a noun, a traditional vocal form), ballads, jigs, hornpipes and reels that would be welcome at any Wicca wing-ding.
This band frequently gigs at Story Tavern in Burbank, and at Scottish Highland Games, bluegrass festivals and Irish fairs around the shire on the reg. They’ll be live Saturday, June 14 at California Celtic Fest in Placentia on the Pub Stage, and at the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia on Friday, August 29 at 6:00 PM.
James Yoshizawa, Bodhrán player for The Stepwise Band, is applauded worldwide for his mastery of this ancient form of drumming. His band-mates Liam Lewis and Olivia Breidenthal joined us for a pre-Solstice glimpse of what to expect on their forthcoming, mostly-vocals second album tentatively titled “From the Ground,” a song about a tree that Breidenthal wrote while on jury duty.
“The tree is such a powerful expression of feminine consciousness,” says Breidenthal, who fiddles in the Galway style. “She gives shade, beauty, protection.”
“It’s pastoral,” says Breidenthal, a San Marino native, “because our music has such an intrinsic relationship with the natural world.” One of the duo’s favorite excursions is to a reindeer camp in Fairbanks, where they play and sing for the caribou. Their songs also reference thrushes and robins and one unlucky magpie, as well as trees.
Lewis, who grew up in Highland Park, discovered his love of Irish music as a kid attending Sweets Mill Folk Camp in the Sierras, 45 miles or so north of Fresno. “We camped out under this canopy of tall trees,” he says, “and the forest just got inside me.” Today, Lewis often walks as a way to shape a new melody, often around Alhambra Park near where the couple lives. The physical, outdoor, embodied life seems embedded in the creative process of these artists.
Video: V. Thomas
They play “Rose and Heather,” “Kilmovee Jig,” and “Muireann’s Jig,” among others, and the tunes ascend from earthy rhythms with melodic strands of ethereal tenderness and piercingly pure longing. “I think that’s the appeal of Irish music” says Lewis, “its deep mystery, its ambiguity. Often, traditional Irish music just sounds like jaunty drinking ballads you’d sing in a pub with a crowd. Until you actually drink in the lyrics.”
On the drive back up toward Eaton Canyon, musing on fire required a reality-check. Irish music has a strong, keen sense of place, but that place is nothing like the place we’re in. Call it the RenFaire Effect, fueled by the memory of my sweltering afternoons as an alive-alive-O! tavern-wench, slinging frosty steins and hoisting aloft obscenely huge turkey legs as the mercury climbed. Clad in boots, bustiers, buskins, bodkins, layers of sheepskins, waxed linen, woolens, velvets, leathers, chain-mail, furs (some faux, some not), tweeds, twills, feathers, falconry gloves, our crew was dressed for traipsing around the frigid mizzle off St. George’s Channel, rather than busting ye olde most righteous sweat in the superheated updrafts of Irwindale.
This is the same sort of cultural dysmorphia that might give us pause as we plan our Midsummer merriment. To state it plainly, our landscape has now been quite thoroughly sanctified by fire, thank you very much. Many of us continue to contend with afterburn, smoke-contamination, soot, loss, displacement. Somehow the prospect of more incendiary display doesn’t hold the appeal it once did.
Even having a fireplace in a region where the temperature rarely drops below 50ºF seems like more displaced cosplay, or maybe wishful thinking (same for those rain barrels). As of 2019, “Spare the Air” days may be called by SCAQMD at any moment, and the installation of any new wood burning devices is banned in new constructions and remodels, important to note as we rebuild. Even outdoor BBQ sales are trending down, according to CNN, although grill manufacturers like Weber are hoping for a rebound. Could America’s romance with fire be guttering, in response to global warming and the soaring cost of beef and chicken?
Surveying my parched backyard which now resembles the surface of a giant Wheat Thin, there’s no denying that our landscape and geology more closely resemble those of the Maya than the Celts. So, facing south instead of east may hold some insights on how to better read the room, and maybe celebrate Summer Solstice in a more meaningful way.
The ancients, as well as scholar Joseph Campell and those who followed, warned of the need to honor the entire pantheon equally, lords of rain as well as fire, since gods by nature are petty, jealous beings. This realization may make modern sense as we contemplate how best to celebrate Summer Solstice, not to mention July 4, in our increasingly Pyrocene age.
The Language of the Bees
Two thousand or so miles from our burg lies Chichén Itzá, in south-central Yucatan. This spot is the home of the Pyramid of Kukulkán, Mexico’s answer to Newgrange, Ireland’s Neolithic monument that pre-dates Stonehenge and, incidentally, also the Pyramids of Giza. Kukulkán is the feathered serpent of the Maya, a deity analogous with Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec and Toltec. He is the creator-god of rain and winds, a formidable hybrid of bird and rattlesnake.
The four-sided Pyramid of Kukulkán, built prior to 1050 CE, is an enormous calendar and observatory, with a total of 365 steps. During Summer Solstice, the slinky, descending shadow cast by the steps suggests the serpent-god slithering back down into the underworld for a restorative spa holiday.
The glyphs and codices confirm that offerings of honey from the stingless Melipona beecheii bee were made to Kukulkán, to ask for the blessing of life-giving rain.
Honey was a solar sacrament for the Maya, who cultivated their stingless Melipona bees for millennia. Shamans regarded the honey as a tangible covenant of cooperation between humans and bees, ritually extracting from the combs only twice a year for use as currency, in medicine, and for religious offerings. A bit elaborate for our context, granted, but pollinators need our support now more than ever in the aftermath of devastation by fire.
Myriad cultures celebrated the power of the sun by keeping bees, comparing the heliotropism of plants to their belief that the sun circled the earth. We now know, as perhaps they did, that bees communicate the coordinates of food locations to their comrades by dancing, angling themselves in the direction of the sun as a navigational baseline. Some, like the Maya, likened this figure-eight “waggle dance” of bees to the paths of various planets, notably Venus.
The Egyptians and Minoans also honored bees as children of the sun, bearers of divine favor as well as playing a practical role essential to human life on earth. And who among us hasn’t marveled at the geometry of a honeycomb? Anthropologists often cite the comb as the unconscious basis of the maze or labyrinth archetype, as well as the dizzyingly vaulted muqarnas or Mocárabe of mosques. The Fibonacci spiral design of the hives made by Australia’s stingless Tetragonula carbonaria “sugarbag” bees is unique to that isolated species, but seeing it for the first time can confirm our human association of bees with the cosmic.
At the other end of the world, the Irish, too, have a long-standing relationship with their bees that goes beyond working all day for the sugar in your tay.
Perhaps arising from Celtic beliefs, bees were regarded as messengers between the worlds, able to carry missives between the quick and the dead. For this reason “telling the bees” is an Irish custom that found its way cross the Atlantic to colonial New England.
The goodwife of the household made a practice of informing the beehives of weddings, births, and whenever someone in the family had died, draping the hives with a bit of black crepe for this sad occasion. To neglect this courtesy, the story goes, would result in either sick bees or a complete desertion of the hives. Today, 5th-6th century CE St. Gobnait is Ireland’s patron saint of bees and her legend tells of the saint using bees to heal the sick and even scare off invaders.
Altadena beekeeper and founder of Buzzed Honeys honey shop David Bock, who was displaced from his home as the result of the Eaton Fire, says “Our burned-out region has experienced a tremendous loss of vegetative biodiversity, hopefully temporary. Less forage makes it hard for bees to sustain their colony.”
How to help? Rip out your big ol’ lawn, weed out all non-native species and continue to do so, and make room for the indigenous. And, if your former home is now a vacant lot, Bock is happy to place some of his hives there; you’ll be reimbursed with free “totally raw, extremely local” product.
Bock adds, “Bringing more pollinators to the burn area will support our ecosystem and contribute to the re-greening of the neighborhood.” Those interested in hive hosting are invited to text him at 323-487-2747.
Waxing Nostalgic
The irony of Summer Solstice, of course, is that in astronomical terms, it represents the ending of the big light, not the beginning. Swedish daughters crowned in lights for Santa Lucia Day (December 13) have more on the ball, since Winter Solstice represents longer days and the approach of Spring, while Summer Solstice signals the opposite.
Marike Anderson, lately of South Pasadena, began making candles as a way to cope with her grief at the passing her husband Edwin in 2021. Today, her Altadena Candle Company is a natural expression of her abiding love for our foothill community. There’s one called “El Rancho,” and one called “Community Garden,” particularly poignant in light of the fact that Anderson’s Altadena house was lost to the fires.
Anderson is just now putting the finishing touches on her new candle called “Altadena,” which she describes as having key notes of citrus, jasmine, cedar…”like the sacred Deodar trees all around Altadena, and musk, for earthiness.”
She says “It’s easy to keep loving Altadena because it is the community combined with nature that make it extraordinary, and both are resilient and beautiful. The people have bonded together to support, protect, and love each other and the land while facing paralyzing devastation. It’s inspiring and healing.”
Burning one of Marike’s all-natural soy wax candles with cotton wick may then be a way for others to process their loss, and make peace with fire.
Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.
