An issue with Summer Solstice that I still have is in how scalable it is across communities.
One axis on which holiday-concepts vary is in how much effort and skill they require on the part of organizers. For example:
Mainstream Memorial Day just involves a barbecue. That’s basically it.
Rationalist Seder (or, say, regular Seder) and Petrov Day just involve having a booklet that people read from. The instructions are baked into the booklet. It doesn’t require any special skills although it does require you to actually do the thing.
Rationalist Winter Solstice as typically practiced requires A) a fair amount of critical mass of musical skill/practice (it’s okay if most people aren’t good singers or know the songs, but you need some combination of some people who can sing on key or people who know the songs well enough), and B) a fair amount of work preparing heartfelt stories. Theoretically the heartfelt stories could be replaced with something canned, but I don’t think anyone’s done that yet.
Summer Solstice is maybe approximately as challenging as Winter Solstice, but if you want to get anything like the drum circle effect described in this post, you need a bunch of skills that are even less common among rationalist-types.
In a local community that has a critical mass of relevant skills, this is all fine. I think the best holiday celebrations will always have effort, skill and intentionality invested in them. But I do think it’s something of an outstanding To-Do to create a version of both Solstices that’s relatively achievable by local communities that don’t have those skills yet.
Scalability depends on location, as well. And on having someone with the right spiritual/aesthetic sense to be able to independently generate the following intuitions, and other intuitions from the same place:
If you want to do Summer Solstice on the East coast, start at dawn rather than finishing at sunset.
If you’re on neither coast, find the highest mountain you can, and figure out whether sunrise or sunset is correct based on which direction is more obviously liminal.
Know how to direct the flow of people at the correct moments, so that they can all wind up in the same space at the appropriate times while still being completely unrestrained during the rest of the day, and without anyone *realizing* that their flow is being directed.
Have the courage to not give in to people who want to “lower the bar” on activity / effort, because they cannot meaningfully participate in a high-effort activity. Try to accommodate those people if at all possible, but never at the cost of lowering the maximum effort that the highly energetic people are allowed to throw in.
An issue with Summer Solstice that I still have is in how scalable it is across communities.
One axis on which holiday-concepts vary is in how much effort and skill they require on the part of organizers. For example:
Mainstream Memorial Day just involves a barbecue. That’s basically it.
Rationalist Seder (or, say, regular Seder) and Petrov Day just involve having a booklet that people read from. The instructions are baked into the booklet. It doesn’t require any special skills although it does require you to actually do the thing.
Rationalist Winter Solstice as typically practiced requires A) a fair amount of critical mass of musical skill/practice (it’s okay if most people aren’t good singers or know the songs, but you need some combination of some people who can sing on key or people who know the songs well enough), and B) a fair amount of work preparing heartfelt stories. Theoretically the heartfelt stories could be replaced with something canned, but I don’t think anyone’s done that yet.
Summer Solstice is maybe approximately as challenging as Winter Solstice, but if you want to get anything like the drum circle effect described in this post, you need a bunch of skills that are even less common among rationalist-types.
In a local community that has a critical mass of relevant skills, this is all fine. I think the best holiday celebrations will always have effort, skill and intentionality invested in them. But I do think it’s something of an outstanding To-Do to create a version of both Solstices that’s relatively achievable by local communities that don’t have those skills yet.
Scalability depends on location, as well. And on having someone with the right spiritual/aesthetic sense to be able to independently generate the following intuitions, and other intuitions from the same place:
If you want to do Summer Solstice on the East coast, start at dawn rather than finishing at sunset.
If you’re on neither coast, find the highest mountain you can, and figure out whether sunrise or sunset is correct based on which direction is more obviously liminal.
Know how to direct the flow of people at the correct moments, so that they can all wind up in the same space at the appropriate times while still being completely unrestrained during the rest of the day, and without anyone *realizing* that their flow is being directed.
Have the courage to not give in to people who want to “lower the bar” on activity / effort, because they cannot meaningfully participate in a high-effort activity. Try to accommodate those people if at all possible, but never at the cost of lowering the maximum effort that the highly energetic people are allowed to throw in.