Midsummer exists as its own realm within my mind. Golden light, glittering dew drops, dancing fireflies, lusciously soft grass beneath bare, gentle feet. Lazy lounging by trickling water, fruitful flavours bursting across my tongue. Content sighs, lovely music, vast starlight. Everything moves slower. Gentler. With elegance, radiance & magick. The music lifts & carries. Like wishes on soft winds.

But there is also the fire.

Blazing bonfires, like the Sun Himself stepped into our world for a time.

Perhaps for the music.

Bursts of sparks leap ecstatically into the night, joyously dancing with their friends among the stars. Curling smoke, deep and dark, forming dragons and queens, telling stories as old as the Earth Herself. The dark world of the night is alight with gold and red, exposing all that would be hidden and pulling it into the divine enlightenment of the dance. The Moon above us, bright and full in silver gowns.

And the drums.

I always hear the drums.

Deep, deep in the earth. Loud, loud in the blood. Carrying us, lifting us through the stories living through us. Legends old and new, history imagined and reawakened. Something in us coming alive as only the heartbeat of all that is can incite.

So many things, so many feelings, so much to submerge myself and all my senses in.

Escape. Escape. Escape into the world beyond.

Moments like this, memories that don’t exist, places I’ve never been, music I’ve never heard, and spirits I’ve never touched, make me forever grateful for the small moments in this world where magick still can be found.

In a world so drowning in hate, where we are manipulated and misinformed, trained and molded to move against each other, betray each other, where we are divided and conquered and told we are free… Where we call for merciless blood while hiding away our own hands, while painting illusions across the truth of our eyes. In a world that at many times feels cruel, and unsafe, and beyond the reach of goodness…

There are still babies laughing.

There are still kittens sneezing.

There are still bumblebees making their lazy way on a sunny day.

There are dragonflies with mosaic wings, waterfalls and sacred springs, prayers and wishes and rebirths, and that first, real love.

There are symphonies of starling murmurations, secret hidden places where the oldest creatures in the world hold their cradles of life, where we have never seen (and I hope we never do). There are children still in love with their wild, and auroras of every colour painted across the canvas of the gods.

There are quiet shafts of gold, dancing with the glitter of a thousand moments, in an old room filled with older books.

Someone, somewhere, is casting their first circle.

Someone, somewhere, is hearing a piece of music for the first time, and the places inside them that have sat dormant and scarred for too long are breaking open like dams.

Someone, somewhere, is coming alive again, after a long, long death, in unforgiving darkness.

They are forgiving themselves. And the darkness.

Yes. There is still magick to be found.

And when the magick is quiet, and the harrowing world seems distracted elsewhere for a while, I can escape to that world beyond. The one that exists in me always, alongside so many others. All the places I am free, and magick grows and thrives…in me.

And when I come back perhaps I’ll find that pieces of that world have followed me here, that I may calm my chaos long enough to see a shimmer of gold across the water, or an aura in the flames. Perhaps there is music carried on the wind.

Are those stars that dance with my hair?

So many things, so many feelings, so much to submerge myself and all my senses in.

Escape, escape.

Return, return.

A Midsummer’s dream, indeed.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, 
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

Oberon, William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I wish thee magick.