✦ Midsummer Practice
A Threshold Moment for the Longest Day
What does the summer solstice bring forward for you? A peak? A pause? A turning point? Can we dwell in this hinge of the year consciously, letting our body register what the mind can only reach toward?
This week, before the solstice passes, try this:
Go outside at dusk or dawn — and remove your shoes. Let your feet find the ground and the ground find you, again. Attend what may rise in you when the light is still generous and the air holds its redolence, the heat, and green of all this growth.
Bring a question to this threshold. Not a question that needs answering — a question that needs holding. Let the solstice light be the container. Let the turning of the season do what turning seasons do.
Notice, in your journal, in images that may come, in constellations of emotions, what your body knew first, before the mind began trying to sound it out.
If this kind of embodied, unhurried, listening at the edge of what can be named resonates for you right now, then this issue of our Haden Resource Guide is for you.
✦ In This Issue
✦ A Word from Corey
Corey Keyes, our executive director at the Haden Institute, recorded such a moving and timely message about his personal experience of the summer solstice and how that intersected with both his own training and work at Haden — and the collective work we do here. Settle in and savor a few minutes with Corey from the sumptuous Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York.
✦ The Resource Guide
Seven Resources for Body, Light, and the Sacred Season
We’ve organized these by time investment. Pick the entry point that fits this week.
🌅 Quick Dip ~15 minutes
“Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” — Ross Gay
Poem · YouTube · Free
A long, exuberant ode to figs, neighbors, the dying and the growing — a poem that treats gratitude as a full-body practice.
Taizé Chant — an embodied prayer practice
Practice invitation · taize.fr · Free scores and recordings
Find a candle, a quiet room, and one chant. Sing it until it stops being a performance and becomes a breath. The Taizé community offers free scores and recordings for exactly this kind of solitary practice.
🔥 Full Sitting ~an hour
Celtic Spirituality and the Sacredness of the Earth — Philip Newell
Video · YouTube · ~60 minutes · Free
One of the foremost voices in Celtic Christian spirituality on the sacredness of created things and the body’s place in that holiness.
Film · Directed by Tomm Moore · 2009 · 75 minutes · Available on streaming platforms
A luminous, hand-drawn film about the making of the Book of Kells — the forest as labyrinth, light as a living thing, sacred art as the plot.
📖 Deep Dive many hours
Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God — Kaitlin B. Curtice
Book · Brazos Press, 2020
A Potawatomi citizen and Christian poet traces what it means to belong to a place, a people, and a God — on her own terms.
Moving Toward Life — Anna Halprin
Book · Wesleyan University Press, 1995
Five decades of essays, scores, and photographs from the pioneer of dance as ritual and healing — the body as the site of transformation.
Make Your Own Paints from Local Rocks — Dana O’Driscoll / The Druids Garden
Blog post · thedruidsgarden.com · Free
A practical, personal guide to finding color in local stones and making your own paint from the land.
✦ An Invitation
Still finding your way to Haden?
The practices in this guide — embodied attention, the art of holding space, learning to witness another’s unfolding — are exactly what Haden’s Spiritual Direction Certification develops over eighteen months. If something in these pages has named a longing you’ve been carrying, our July 23 virtual information session is a natural next step.
Register for the July 23 Info Session →For Haden graduates and friends
You’ve been through this formation. You know what it opens. The best thing you can do for someone who’s ready is put this guide in their hands — and let them know there’s a seat waiting for them this fall. Forward this issue. Tell someone you think is ready.
Download and share the July 23 flier →
