The crack where the light (& the fire) gets in

On celebrating winter solstice

I’m a summer girl and this year the greyness of winter here in Melbourne has got into my bones. I’ve found myself racing out to stand in the garden whenever the sun breaks through the clouds, and lamenting the fact we don’t have a fire at our place to crackle a flame into the room to warm us. But last weekend I got the fire and warmth I’ve been missing at an annual Winter Solstice celebration.

Each year, in a back block out in Eltham, a family dear to us (builders, artists, carpenters and their friends) host a Winter Solstice party. More recently, the bonfire at the centre of the celebration has taken on grand sculptural form - last year an orb, this year a pyramid. Over weeks, the structure comes together: recycled timber is donated, extra hands are called in, something begins to rise from the earth. Chief architect, Lena, is a woman with an eye for detail and precision. As we explore the pyramid on the afternoon it will burn, the craft in every aspect of the structure is apparent; the integrity of the stair case so we can all climb to the top, the wire and paper triangles suspended inside one half of the structure, the gap for the spindly gum tree.

It feels like a festival: there is a stage for the drummers, tents where we can lay our food down to share, mulled wine in big pots and home made sausages on an open fire to feed the crowd. There are fires in buckets, lights in the trees, the kids run and whoop, mates who haven’t seen each other in a while smile and hug. We get a couple of hours to enjoy the pyramid in daylight, we each take a native seedling from the collection in the ‘living room’ of the pyramid, there are wooden triangles on string necklaces to wear and then to throw into the fire with our wishes for the new year. There is a rising buzz - when will it be lit? No one can comprehend that shortly we will burn this beautiful structure to the ground, and yet we are breathless in anticipation for the moment the fire catches.

The stunning recycled timber pyramid as it burns for Winter solstice celebrations

I am vague in my answers to the kids’ questions about why we burn things at Winter Solstice; my answer of ‘light and warmth against the dark’ does not satisfy them, even though when I do a little bowerbirding on the origins of Winter Solstice festivals that’s the general idea. I deep dive: liking the sound of the Burning the Clocks festival in the UK as a response to Christmas commercialism, pondering the fact that our Southern Hemisphere Winter Solstice does not, for obvious reasons, have the same yuletide Christmas theme, and make a promise to myself that I will definitely get to Dark Mofo next year for hedonism and nude bathing.

In any good bowerbirding session, I find myself at The Marginalian and it delivered with Annie Dillard’s thoughts on winter solstice from her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The whole post is well worth a read but I fixed on Dillard’s words about going in to the gaps:

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

It’s been a time of gaps for me: the gap between finishing a book and waiting for it to be in the world, the gap between one project and the next, the gap between seasons of longer, warmer days. But I find comfort in Dillard’s proposal to stalk and spend the gaps. Maybe, in my forties, I can be more at ease with spending afternoons instead of just frantically filling them. And the gaps - ‘the cracks’ as Cohen put it so well - are. of course, where the light gets in.

Like the ancient festivals - our Winter Solstice celebration was filled with light and warmth, feasting and friends, and much music. Gong and glass harp creator Carmen Tuke made haunting, ethereal music on a gong and glasses that glowed in the firelight, and the dancing drummers O’ziriguidum Escola de Samba seemed to narrate the intensity and momentum of the fire as the pyramid burned.

Artist and creator Carmen Tuke plays the gong at the Winter Solstice celebration.

We left before watching the sun rise, even before the flames burned down (small humans on a school night make sticking to the details of pagan rituals trickier) but we commented that our faces still felt warm from the fire when we got home. I reckon I’ll carry the warmth of that fire all through the rest of the winter.

1. From THE RIVER by Italian illustrator, Alessandro Sanna. 2. Photograph of a silhouetted crowd in front of smoke and flames under a cloudy night sky

Tomorrow - June 22nd - is officially the shortest day of the year and also World Bathing Day . My mum’s been cold water bathing for months now (I like to think this involves her proximity to the Yarra and not just the fact that she’s much braver than me) and tomorrow I’m literally taking the plunge and diving into the river with her. Given the weather forecast for our part of the world is approximately 8 degrees and who KNOWS how cold the river will be - I’m feeling both nervous and anticipating some kind of cold water high to kick me into a new season. Shall report back. Let me know if you, too, submerge yourself in waters - icy or otherwise - for Solstice vibes.

Wishing you warmth and all the good things into this next season. K x

Coming Up

• Countdown is TRULY on for the August release of The Hummingbird Effect! Very excited to let you know all dates and venues for the tour soon and looking forward to visiting bookshops and readers in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and regional Vic (Sorrento event is open for bookings) and NSW. If you’re keen to pre-order the book, you can do so via your chosen retailer here or via your local indie bookseller.

• I’ll be running an online training session for ASA on The Power of the Podcast on Wednesday 19th July 1-2pm AEST. If you’ve ever wanted to start your own pod - I’ll be sharing all the tips, tricks and resources we’ve gathered along our six seasons of producing The First Time podcast.

• Talking podcast things, all this week we are handing over to first time authors from #debutcrew2023 on our First Time podcast instagram. This self-formed bunch of debut writers is THE most supportive and generous bunch and we’re delighted to be shouting out to them and their work. Jump on and say hello.