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.—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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Hello Lovelies—
First, there are a few spots left for the upcoming Writing Wild Workshop in Rollinsville, CO. Sunday June 23rd 10-3pm. Friends sigh up for $25 off each. Register here: Writing Wild with Karen Auvinen I would love to write with you!
Buckets of gratitude for reading A Woman’s Place Is In the Wild. I appreciate all of you who sustain and help me grow these weekly meditations by reading and commenting or sharing. If you are not yet a patron and you can afford it, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription (for as little as $6/mo). Your financial support of the hours of work that go into these meditations helps keep the lights on, and I appreciate it.
These long days.
I feel them in my skin, gone brown with sun. In my bare feet toeing clover and dandelion in the yard. In the early mornings, when hummingbirds arrive with in the dusky morning light and in the short cascading nights still cool enough for good sleep.
Pine dust filters the air, covering every surface with fine yellow grit and the garden comes blushingly into bloom as Lady’s Mantel spreads wide palms to receive rain and columbine raise arching heads. A single early poppy sprouts.
This year, the season opens like a beautiful memory. I feel as my child-self felt with the long knell of the season ringing in front of me. It has been a few years since my summer has been so wide open—without the need to travel and teach, and I am by giddy with the prospect of long days filled with writing and reading and walking the woods.
This year I marked the beginning of summer early with a Midsummer Party, the occasion, a happy convergence of visiting grad school writer pals, old dear friends, and father’s day.
Taking a cue from my Finnish ancestors, for whom the the first day of summer marks the longest of its “white nights” and is celebrated with bonfires and saunas (and no doubt lots of vodka), I embraced some ancestral traditions.
Midsummer is of course the pagan celebration of abundance and fertility and love. The fields are planted and there are prayers for a good harvest. But it’s also the night when young lovers might dream of a (as yet unknown) beloved. What summer magic.
For my celebration, guests were greeted with midsummer flower crowns and a kiss: Hyvää juhannusta! We played Molkky or Finska, a Finnish pin-throwing game and picnicked on my buttermilk fried chicken. For dessert: a Swedish Midsummer Cake with strawberries and lemon curd. People drank wine with frozen strawberry ice-cubes or sipped beer or gin and tonics. There is something both lovingly indolent and relaxed about a party held out of doors sheltered by pine and aspen beneath the dappled light of a high altitude afternoon sun.
For decades my annual party has been a mid-winter feast (the legendary Fuck T.S. Eliot Party), meant to lighten the dark days of February and raise a finger to winter. In what feels like opening a window in my life, I have decided to make Midsummer the new party for which I will plot and plan all year round. As I enter these older years, it feels more natural to celebrate and embrace instead of resist and rebel.
I have been thinking about what it means to embrace —to take something to heart. Much of my life is lead by force, by plowing through my days, by steadily hauling that rock up the hill, but I am shedding that now. My Midsummer dream? To be open to the wonder of each day, to the acknowledgement of each blossom; to soak it up, as the garden receives rain, to ever glance from “heaven to Earth, and Earth to heaven” and feel the knowing in my heart that the two are exactly the same.
May it be so with you.
Good Solstice, my friends, wherever you are.
Thank you for reading.
Big love,
Karen
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Sign up with a friend for my in-person Writing Wild Workshops this summer. Get $25 off each.
I hope to see you this summer.
Upcoming Events
Writing Wild with Karen Auvinen
Space limited
Sunday, June 24th 10-3pm
Rollinsville, CO
$150
OR Register with a friend - $125each
Writing Wild with Karen Auvinen
Space Limited
Sunday, August 4th 10-3pm
Rollinsville, CO
$150
OR Register with a friend - $125each
Living Wild Writing & Creativity Prompts
The next Living Wild Writing & Creativity prompt comes out this Saturday. Paid subscribers have access to the full archive of Living Wild Writing & Creativity Prompts (look for the fox pictures on my home page).
I will also be adding special audio reflections for paid subscribers, coming soon!
A Woman’s Place is in the Wild is a reader-supported weekly meditation on all things wild. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you would like to support my work and these weekly posts, the best way is by becoming a paid subscriber, which gives you access to the full archive of weekly Living Wild Meditations plus all of the Living Wild creativity and writing prompts. If you want to read more, check out Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living.
In this fourth season of my life, I am ready to celebrate and embrace what is good and beautiful. Of course, when evil rears its ugly head, I will resist. But while I am still living on this gorgeous, vibrant planet, I intend to do my part to counteract evil eac day by actively seeking and sharing the beautiful and the good.
a dreamy party you gave 💕 and this is a sweet ringing: “it feels more natural to celebrate and embrace instead of resist and rebel”