Happy Solstice, wherever you are.

I woke up this morning just at sunrise, and stood in the cold light looking out at the construction site across the street that’s going to be there at least another year before it goes back to being an athletic field(1). And it made me think, of course, that there was the darkness, and here is sunreturn, and it gets brighter from here but still colder and more stormy for quite a long time.

I’ve been listening to the new Florence + the Machine album, “Everybody Scream,” with the kind of focused attention and endless loop vibe I used to spend on listening in high school and college and my twenties, when music came encoded within plastic rectangles or discs, and I could afford maybe one new record a month.

And friends, I love this album. It’s not full of instant bangers like some of my other favorites of hers, but it’s a record of and response to what was an apparently catastrophic couple of years for her personally, and its… incredible. It’s a profoundly pagan album about loss, and rage, and trying to create art as a woman getting older in a misogynistic society, and the artistic drive to greatness and its terrible frustrations, and betrayal—by people, by your body, by society—and it is exactly what I needed at the end of this long, exhausting, somehow fleeting year as I try to regain my own misplaced art and my sense of self and my relationship with my own aging body.

The song that I keep returning to is “Perfume and Milk,” a dark, whispery, deeply wise meditation from the point of view of a woman who has suffered some terrible loss and is responding by retreating to her little house all alone and becoming a witch as the seasons turn.

It pushes one of my deepest narrative buttons: this idea that when you are faced with catastrophe, you are also faced with a choice. That if you want to survive and heal you must do the hard work to evolve and change; you must reach down deep and become your own magic. You must become the thing that it is not comfortable to be but is needed in that time, whether that’s the tumbleweed magic of Russian thistle scattering seeds as its blown across the plain or the deep taproot bulwark magic of an ancient oak sheltering its community of life.

My favorite Richard Thompson song is “Beeswing,” and I was chatting with Liz Bourke about how this present song (“Perfume and Milk”) seems of a piece with it thematically. I opined that the Florence song is the subject position of the same narrative: “Beeswing” is about what happens when your manic pixie dream girl turns out to be a witch you cannot tame or hold; “Perfume and Milk” is the emotional journey of the woman who has chosen not to be domesticated but to claim her magic.

I use the term “Harpy stories” for this—I can’t remember if I coined it or Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison did, back in the livejournal days. We were talking at the time about our favorite narratives that show people and often specifically women rejecting the return to normalcy that is so often the point of portal fantasy(2) making that choice to be the crone, to be the witch on the edge of town, to be the dangerous thing—and we wound up making the comparison to Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, one of my all-time favorite books—and the thematic freight in the sequences with Mommy Fortuna and King Haggard trying to bind wild magic and in their individual ways control and enslave it, and the unicorn’s comment on how well that works:

“Speaking of livers,” the unicorn said, “Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that.”

That is as true a statement on art and life and magic as I have ever heard, and I believe it deeply. That’s why art is hard, and terrifying, and hurts so much to create. And it’s also why it’s so necessary.

Anyway, there’s a harpy in The Last Unicorn, and she serves as a vivid illustration of the truth of the unicorn’s statement. And an inspiration for my own story, “The Horrid Glory of its Wings.” (3)

You don’t have to be miserable or suffer to create art; but you do have to be honest, and honesty is terrifying. And sometimes to make magic you need to go it alone and be who you are meant to be, and let the magic lead.

So here we are: the solstice. The rebirth.

The time when we decide who we are and who we are going to be for the next cycle. It’s winter here; it may be summer where you are. But something is shifting. And we have work to do and truths to tell, no matter how much it aches.

I am going to try to be the harpy again, if I have forgotten how.

And all shall be well.

All shall be well.

(1)(The college across the street is drilling for geothermal. I approve but wow, they start at 6:59 am and our bedroom faces the street.)

(2)(You had your adventure and now you are too old for Narnia, go home.)

(3)(I also often cite Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane in this conversation, with Jenny Waynest’s climactic choice being another discussion of the Harpy Problem.)