The summer solstice falls on June 20 or 21 in the northern hemisphere and is the day with the most hours of light of the year: about fifteen in Madrid, sixteen in Paris, more than eighteen in Stockholm. It's the best time of the year for a long artist appointment, and the natural time to close the twelve weeks of the Artist's Path if you started on the spring equinox.
What exactly happens on June 21
The solstice is the moment in which the Earth's axis of rotation reaches its maximum inclination towards the Sun. In the northern hemisphere it occurs between June 20 and 21 – occasionally the 22nd – and marks the day with the most hours of light of the year. In the southern hemisphere, that same moment is the winter solstice: the longest night.
The word comes from Latin sun sister, sun stopped. For a few days around the date, the Sun's position on the horizon at dawn barely moves. It seems to stop. Then it starts to back away.
How much light you receive depends brutally on your latitude. In Barcelona there are about fifteen hours and fifteen minutes between sunrise and sunset. In Paris, sixteen past ten. In Stockholm, eighteen thirty. In Tromsø, in northern Norway, the Sun does not set directly: there have been two months of continuous daylight.
And here is an asymmetry that almost no one knows and that is good to know if you get up at dawn: The earliest sunrise of the year does not fall on the day of the solstice. It falls a few days earlier, around June 14-17 in mid-latitudes. The latest sunset comes a few days later, around the 24th-27th. The cause is the equation of time, the lag between real solar noon and clock noon. The solstice has the longest day, but not the earliest morning.
Why the longest day is good creative news (and also bad)
The good news: you have a huge day of light. If your date with the artist consists of going out into the countryside with a notebook, taking photos, drawing from life or simply walking without a destination, the solstice gives you a margin that no other day of the year offers. You can leave at six in the morning and return at ten at night without turning on a flashlight.
The bad news: the solstice is also the peak of everything else. It is the time of festivities—San Juan night, bonfires, festivals—, the end of the school year, the closing of the term and the beginning of the season of social commitments. Julia Cameron insists that dating the artist is a solitary act, and June 21 is probably the most social day of the year in the Mediterranean.
The practical consequence is that you have to decide. Either the solstice is the festival or it is the date with the artist, and both things are legitimate, but they are not the same thing no matter how much the second looks like the first from the outside. The date with the artist is not about having fun. It's being with you long enough for something to appear.
My proposal: part of the day. The morning is yours, from dawn to mid-afternoon. The night belongs to everyone. It is the only day of the year when that division fits comfortably.
The date with the solstice artist: a twelve-hour script
You don't need to do all this. It's a menu, not an exam.
05:30 — Dawn. Check the sunrise time in your city and be in your place fifteen minutes before. A place with a horizon: a beach, a rooftop, a viewpoint, an open field. Don't wear headphones. Don't take photos for the first ten minutes. It's surprisingly difficult and it's exercise.
06:30 — The morning pages, away from home. Three pages written wherever you are. Writing outdoors changes what you write: there is more world and less rumination. If you are interested in the phenomenon, we discuss it in the appointment with the artist in nature and in viewing points for writing.
08:00 — Breakfast alone. No phone. With the notebook open just in case.
10:00 — The expedition. Here's the part Cameron calls filling the well: deliberately exposing yourself to sights, textures, sounds, and places you wouldn't normally choose. A small museum. A hardware store. A nursery. A market. A stretch of river. The rule is that it is new and that it is useless.
2:00 p.m. — Nap. Without irony. The creative peak of the day is not noon and you have been awake for eight hours.
17:00 — Balance time. If the solstice closes your twelve weeks, this is the time to open the letter you wrote to yourself on the equinox. Read it in its entirety before judging it. Then write the answer.
21:45 — The sunset. Watch the sun set. Tomorrow it will last a minute less.
Close the twelve weeks here
If you started the Artist's Path in spring equinox, the twelve weeks will be over around June 12. The solstice arrives eight or nine days later, and that gap is a gift: it gives you time to finish the course without rushing and reserve the longest day for the ceremony.
Cameron dedicates week twelve to regaining a sense of faith. It is the most difficult week to write about without falling into corniness, because what it proposes is not to believe in anything in particular: it is to act as if it were worth continuing to do the work even if there are no guarantees of anything. In this, the solstice is an almost crude metaphor as it is so exact: the brightest day of the year is also the first of the downhill slope, and yet the sun rises.
The closing exercise that I recommend is material, not symbolic. Pick up the morning pages for the twelve weeks. Don't read them: weigh them. Look at the volume. Eighty-four days times three pages is two hundred and fifty-two handwritten pages. That exists. It was inside you three months ago and now it's in a box.
And then decide what to do with them. There are those who keep them. There are those who burn them—we discuss that ritual in burn the morning pages—. There is no right answer, but there is a wrong answer: reread them looking for proof that you have improved. It's not for that.
The fall of July: what no one tells you
On June 22 the days begin to get shorter. At first imperceptibly: in mid-latitudes you lose less than a minute a day during the first two weeks. But in August the loss accelerates to three minutes a day, and by September the difference is evident.
This decrease coincides with vacations, with the breaking of routine, with other people's beds and broken schedules. It is, statistically, the time of year when most people abandon a daily practice that they had maintained for months. Not because summer is hostile to creativity—it's not—but because summer is hostile to creativity. routines, and Cameron's creativity is routine by design.
The strategy that works is to reduce, not stop. One page instead of three. A small notebook in the suitcase. The pages written at eleven in the morning on a terrace instead of at seven in the kitchen. We treat it in morning pages on vacation and in the Artist's Way in July and August.
And when you return in September, there will be the other great restart point of the year. The return of september is, for many people, more real than January 1st.
Five ways to celebrate if you don't have twelve hours
The full version is a luxury. These versions fit into a normal life.
Thirty minutes: dawn and nothing more. Get up, go out, look, come back, have breakfast. It costs half an hour and that's the only thing that matters.
One hour: write where you don't write. Take the notebook and do it on a bench, on a train, on the stairs of a doorway. Changing locations does half the work.
Two hours: an appointment with the normal artist, but in a place with a horizon. Any of the ones you already know, executed where it can be seen far away.
The whole night. If you are one of those whose head is awakened by the night, the solstice also has the shortest night. Writing at dawn outdoors in June is an experience unlike any other, and at five in the morning there is already clarity.
Ten minutes: a list. Write down the ten things you wanted to have done this year but haven't done. Without judgment. Just the list. Save it. Open it on the winter solstice, six months from now, when the night is the longest. It is the most uncomfortable exercise and the most useful of all.
A note against mysticism
The solstice has accumulated tons of symbology: bonfires, druids, Stonehenge, St. John's fires, jumping over embers. It is precious material and you don't have to believe any of it to use it.
What's under the symbol is a simple physical fact: the Earth is tilted 23.4 degrees and on that day the northern hemisphere looks at the Sun with maximum impudence. Everything else—fertility, rebirth, purification by fire—we have put on top of it, for millennia, because we are animals that need to mark time with something.
And that need is exactly what makes ritual useful. Not because June 21 has powers, but because an appointed day turns a diffuse intention into a concrete appointment. Creativity, like everything sustained, works with specific appointments: that's why Cameron puts one on the calendar every week. The solstice is simply the one that sets alone.
Mark it on the calendar. Go see the sunrise. Write three pages. And tomorrow, when the day lasts a minute less, do it again. That's all the method, and the rest is astronomy.