Behind us sits the summer solstice, that great inhalation of light, the point where the sun reached its peak and stood still for a sacred moment before beginning its slow return journey towards darkness once again.
The Oak King is dead. Long live the Holly King!
There is something both sobering and beautiful about halfway points. There is something bittersweet in the summer solstice itself, because woven into the joy of reaching the height of light is the knowledge that from here we begin to descend once more towards winter. And then at the winter solstice there is that glimmer of hope, where the darkest day of the year also marks the beginning of our slow return towards the light. It is the great inhale and exhale. The yin and yang of existence itself.
Learning to mark these turning points is part of stepping away from a purely linear existence. We spend much of life racing towards beginnings and endings; birth and death, Monday and Friday, success and failure, destination and arrival. But halfway points ask something different of us.
They ask us to pause long enough to wonder whether time was ever meant to feel like an arrow fired relentlessly forwards.
Perhaps time could instead be cyclical.
Perhaps our ancestors knew something we’ve forgotten.
‘The arrow of time proposed by physicists works in lab experiments and is a real, observable phenomenon in closed systems. It is a true law. It’s just the wrong law to apply to beings living in open, interconnected systems’, writes Tyson Yunkaporta in Sand Talk. ‘It’s a bit like touting the theory that an economy is thriving when the stock markets are doing well... the actual inhabitants of the economy say, sure, stock prices are spiking, but we’re still hungry.’
As living things we are not machines moving through a timeline. We are seasons. Tides. Moons. We wax and wane.
Which brings me to the blazing elephant standing in the room.
Has anyone else noticed how hot it is?
A ridiculous question, of course.
I am also aware that people have become fond of saying this may well be the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. A sentence carrying the strange quality of both a joke and a prophecy.
Here on Sark the valley where I live looks scorched. Leaves have crisped and browned beneath sun and wind, so that in places it already resembles early autumn despite summer only just beginning. The land looks confused. The seasons themselves feel as though somebody shuffled the cards and dealt them out in the wrong order.
And perhaps many of us feel confused too.
Because somewhere beneath the weather chat and the fan purchases and discussions about whether it’s too hot to sleep sits a quieter truth that many of us are carrying.
We know something is happening.
Over half of the planet’s wildlife populations have disappeared within my lifetime. We are watching systems strain and fray while still trying to answer emails, pay bills and remember why we walked into a room.
This may be the heaviest lead modern humanity has ever held.
Lead: the dense material of alchemy. The thing nobody wanted but everyone inherited.
Perhaps we have been here before as a species, long enough ago that little evidence remains. Yet woven through myths from every corner of the world are stories of floods, collapses, fires and endings. Warnings. Memories. Maps.
Because somewhere inside us lives an understanding that even if we are capable of extraordinary destruction, we are also capable of extraordinary repair. Not because we deserve to prevail. But because at some point we have to make amends.
Someone has to tend the fires after the burning. Someone has to care for what remains. Someone has to stay and help the world heal itself.
And maybe we’ve done this before.
And maybe we’ll do it again.
Back in the dark soil of winter perhaps there were intentions quietly planted. Not loud declarations shouted into January, but whispers. Seeds. Desires. Things that wanted to become.
What did you want to create this year?
Not simply books, businesses or practical things, though perhaps those too.
What did you hope to create within yourself?
More courage?
More rest?
More honesty?
A stronger sense of belonging?
A softer heart?
More wonder?
The full moon has a habit of illuminating what busyness prevents us from seeing.
This year in numerology carries the energy of 10 ... completion and beginning occupying the same space. The wheel arriving and turning once more. In esoteric traditions, 10 carries something of the alchemical journey; turning lead into gold.
But alchemy was never about pretending lead wasn’t lead.
It was about transformation.
So perhaps the question at this midpoint isn’t: Have I succeeded?
Perhaps it is: What is my lead?
What heavy thing was placed into my hands?
How, through the strange and messy process of simply living, has this year already begun to transmute it?
Maybe grief became tenderness.
Maybe uncertainty became trust.
Maybe heartbreak became discernment.
Maybe exhaustion became boundaries.
Maybe fear became action.
Maybe the gold is already there, only not in the shape you imagined.
Capricorn is ruled by Saturn, and Saturn rarely arrives carrying instant gratification. Saturn is the old teacher, the keeper of time, the planet associated with responsibility, consequences and long-term thinking. Saturn asks uncomfortable questions.
Not: What do you want right now?
But: What are you building that might still matter years from now?
Perhaps this is precisely the medicine of this full moon arriving beneath these blazing skies.
Because heatwaves pull us into immediate reality. Too hot. Too dry. Too much. We seek shade, water, relief. Yet Saturn quietly sits in the background reminding us that we are not only responsible for surviving today but for imagining tomorrow.
Saturn does not concern itself with despair.
Saturn concerns itself with work.
Slow work.
Patient work.
The work of tending soil even if you may never sit beneath the tree.
The work of making amends.
The work of taking responsibility for what has been inherited and asking: what can I leave behind that is kinder than what I received?
Perhaps hope itself is a Saturn practice.
Not optimism.
Not pretending everything will somehow work itself out.
Hope as devotion.
Hope as showing up repeatedly.
Hope as planting seeds in uncertain times.
Hope as choosing responsibility in a world that often rewards distraction.
Capricorn understands mountains. It understands slow climbing. It knows meaningful things rarely arrive in flashes of inspiration. It is interested in what remains after inspiration has packed up and gone home.
And perhaps this scorching Sol light is revealing what is ripening.
Look around your life.
What is coming into fruition?
What has quietly grown while you were busy looking elsewhere?
What has become stronger without you noticing?
Because halfway points are not judgement points.
There is no cosmic teacher standing with a clipboard giving marks out of 10.
There is simply a place on the path where you stop for water, turn around and realise you have already travelled further than you thought.
Stand for a moment beneath this full moon.
Take stock.
Notice the lead.
Notice the gold.
And notice too that perhaps becoming has been happening all along, beneath your feet, beneath the heat, beneath the burning light.
If you’d like to hear more from Sark resident Jolie Rose, her weekly podcast, Nonsense In The Chaos, is available on all major listening platforms.
