The Wound Is Where the Light Gets In

Summer Solstice + Father’s Day + Chiron in Taurus

If you have an incredibly uncomfortably complicated relationship with Father’s Day… you’re not alone.

I see you.

Father’s Day landing on the Solstice this year feels extra pointed.

Sol = the sun, the son, the sky-god.

It’s the celebration of the longest, most bountiful day of the year, and we’re spending it paying reverence to men.

Fathers, yes. But…also...lots of men.

If you’re noticing a saltiness to my tone, you’re not wrong. Because I’ll be honest: I’m personally ready to see men step it up.

Not only specific men that I can name, but Men-at-large.

Fathers are so important. So are the men underneath who hold that title.

Step it up. Own yourselves. Listen.

That’s it, actually.

It’s not actually stepping it up that I’m desiring from men. It’s leaning in. What im really wanting is for men to start leaning in close enough to listen - even when something is being whispered.

Sheryl Sandburg spent a lot of time and money telling women to lean in.

But I think leaning in is needed from men far more.

This Father’s Day solstice, with the moon half-full and half-new in the sky, it’s time to find balance within the extremes. It’s time to put it all on the table.

A day of extremes

The Sun is traveling through Gate 15 on the Solstice- which in human design is known as the Gate of Extremes.

And that’s exactly what today felt like.

Everything is out on the table at once. The dust has been shaken from the cloth and is hanging in the air, waiting to drop.

Solstice brings a palpably gorgeous, overwhelming chaos to the surface. Nothing is hidden underground on this day. At Solstice, all the work is being done on the flowers of the vine, not in the roots.

So for this reason, Solstice is always a point of maximum contrast.

After months of building toward summer, feeling juiced by the heat and the light and the fullness, something in our bodies is suddenly registering: the days are getting shorter now. The climax has been reached. The sun is so hot, I might want to go inside. What felt like sweet abundance a few weeks ago could now start to feel like a lot to hold.

That’s the gift and the difficulty of this particular threshold. The diversity of information, relationship, and feeling at solstice can feel like SO MUCH. Buzz buzz buzzzz.

And that same diversity can also feel like.. LOVE. Real true honest agape love.

Both the overwhelm and the deep magnetic love are present on the Solstice. Both are Gate 15.

There’s a beautiful Gemini-to-Cancer dynamic happening right now too. Gemini season was bees rolling in experiences - pollinating, gathering, moving between flowers, collecting everything.

But after the Solstice, the bees are going back into the hive. Cancer season is about choosing which of the multitudes to actually nurture. The womb gets fertilized. You can’t bring everything home.

Not all sperm meet the egg. Not all pollens make the honey. In the post-solstice season of Cancer, you choose what gets nourishment.

The solstice is exactly the moment between those two impulses - still holding all of it, just beginning to sense which thread to follow deeper, and which ones to let disintegrate back into the web.

Father’s Day Feels

For me, this day carries a lot. My own father, my grandfathers, my ex-husband. At different times, I wanted more from them as father-figures. Sometimes a lot more.

There’s so much pain in that. So many memories floating through today, living in my body as felt sensations more than linear thoughts. Today brings up so many embodied memory-sensations of misunderstanding. Judgement. Withholding. Fear-based decision making.

And at the same time on this day that is filled with so much heartache and somatic trauma of not-enough and too-much, I’m watching my daughter with her step-dad, my partner.

And I am moved to tears with the deepest gratitude and joy I can imagine.

He is teaching her things I didn’t know fathers could teach - how to listen to yourself, how to stay emotionally present. They laugh together so much. Deep belly laughs. She adores him. He is the most beautiful example of present, attuned, leaning-in-to-listen fathering I have ever witnessed.

And then, despite all that love, I’m a complete asshole to him on Father’s Day.

Because I guess that’s what happens when the absolute beauty of something so personal to your present life touches a deeper, older wound you haven’t finished grieving.

The tenderness comes up fast. The rawness. The grief disguised as irritability.

Which brings me to the astrology of the solstice.

Right before solstice, Chiron moved into Taurus on Friday, after being in Aries for 8 years, since 2018.

For the next seven years while Chiron is in the sign of the Venusian bull, the wounds asking for your attention are the ones that live in your body - in your sensations and your emotions and your nervous system - much more than the wounds in your mind.

Taurus rules the throat, so the wounds surrounding your throat and your voice, specifically, are going to be showing up now.

But the thing about Chiron is, even though his wounds never fully heal, he is the wisest healer and teacher in all of Greek myth. He didn’t transcend his wound - he taught through it.

Chiron would likely open up his Rumi book and tell you: the truth is, sweet child, the wound is where the light gets in.

This solstice-Father’s Day is a Chiron in Taurus moment if I’ve ever felt one.

Whatever is coming up for you today - the grief, the longing, the tenderness, the way you might be snapping at someone you love - that’s not a failure. That’s the wound doing what wounds do when they’re finally ready to be seen, to be witnessed, to be cared for.

Over the coming season and the coming years, ley your wound be felt, in all its extremes. And let it be nourished and tended to and expressed, so the act of doing so can also nourish others.

Notes and prayers

I had really wanted to hold a live ritual on Zoom for each of the eight holy days this year. We gathered for the equinox/ and for mayday, and it was powerful.

This time of the solstice got away from me in the most Gate 15 way possible - full of extremes, full of multitudes, full of exactly the kind of chaos-that-is-also-love that I described above.

So no live ritual today. But I’m not leaving you empty-handed.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can take 50% off any reading with code SOLSTICE. I may also record something sweet and send it out to you - a little ritual to sit with. No promises on timing, but it’s on my heart.

However you’re moving through today - with deep grief or with incomprehensible gratitude- or with both at once - I hope you feel the threshold under your feet.

Nourishing, nurturing Cancer season is here.

And the wound is absolutely where the light gets in.