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Lightning illuminates a graphite sky, as the wind whips through my hair and my aura. Thunder rattles the earth and my bones, and the rain comes down however it will—straight, hard and insistent, or a little sideways and chaotic. Look at the weather forecast for lower Alabama this time of year, and you will see a thundercloud icon on every day of the week. Storms are always a late afternoon possibility. They can be utterly terrifying in a place that has experienced deadly tornados, but they can also be cleansing and renewing. 

Och: my sleep is all messed up. Too. Much. Light.

6:11 a. m. as I write this, and the Sun's already up. When I woke at 4:30, the cardinals were singing their dawn songs. (Like roosters, they have special receptors in their brains that register even the slightest increase in light.) CST: Cardinal Standard Time. Whtt whtt whtt: cheerio! Yeah, and the broom you rode in on, too.

When I went to bed at 11 last night, there was still light in the western sky. Where I live, it's about 8 hours from sundown to sunrise at the summer sunstead, but as any Northron can tell you, just because the Sun's below the horizon doesn't mean it's dark. In Shetland they call it the simmer dim: the long, slow twilights of summer's solstice-tide.

Nor am I the only one. Here and now we're all walking around in a collective state of chronic sleep deprivation. Add heat and voilà: the proverbial Midsummer Madness. Small wonder I've heard more sirens and seen more car crashes during the past two weeks than in the previous two months put together.

For the 8 Sabbats that are a part of the Pagans Down Under blog project, I've decided to share my fledgling '8 Spoked Wheel' system as I work through them properly for the first time myself in my own practice. This is a work in progress that follows a practice for a number of years that did follow the traditional neo-pagan sabbats but after serious reflection I've decided to give an adjusted practice a go that reflects a system I have created that suits.

I don't imagine this could be directly adopted by anyone else and see it as a personal weaving of my own creation. This series of festivals incorporates colour magic and is adapted to suit my local climate and so we begin with Red and an observation I have termed The Reflection. The energy of this thrums throughout late January and early February and could be shifted to suit astrological or lunar correspondences. For this year that would suit the 3rd of February, when a Full Moon in Leo is experienced. The Full Moon in this sign lends a shining, fabulous quality to the season.

Here we are, just past the midpoint between Litha and Mabon. The sun, while not at its zenith, is still high in the sky and hot upon the land. Early crops are being harvested while even more bounty makes ready to soon laden our tables and altars with sustenance and gifts, and fill our pantries with stores for the dark half of the year.

I woke up at 5:15 this morning and the sky was already (or still) full of light. We're in the “summer dim.”

It's a standing joke locally that at 44.9833° North, Minneapolis lies at the same latitude as Bordeaux. Sure couldn't tell from the climate. Ha ha. Here in the middle of the continent, our weather is generally closer to that of Moscow than that of French wine country. Even so, we're still too far south to see the famed “White Nights” of the far North, when the Sun literally never sets and everyone goes sleeplessly frantic in the famed “Midsummer madness.” The fact is, too much light makes you crazy. "White lighters" take note.

Our year here divides roughly into thirds. At the winter sunstead (solstice), we see about 8 hours of light and 16 of darkness. At the summer sunstead, the reverse: 16 hours of day, 8 of dark.