There is a particular quality to the light in late June.
It lingers. The days are long past their longest point, the summer solstice falls on June 21st this year, but the warmth still feels unhurried, unrushed, as though summer has just arrived and has not yet begun counting the days until it leaves. The earth is in full production. Things are ripening. The green has deepened from the tentative brightness of spring into something more substantial, more settled.
And on Monday, June 29th, the Strawberry Moon rises.
The Strawberry Moon is the first full moon of summer, following soon after the June 21st solstice. The name comes from a number of North American native tribes. Among them the Algonquin, Ojibwe, Dakota, Lakota, Chippewa, and Sioux. Who used it to mark the moment when wild strawberries reach peak ripeness and are ready to be gathered. The name is not about what the moon looks like. It is about what the land is doing when the moon rises.
Because the June full moon stays low on the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere, its light passes through a thicker layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to glow with a golden or reddish tint. So it does, in fact, look a little like a strawberry, deep, warm, close to the earth. But the name came first from the harvest, from the act of going out into the fields and finding what was ready.
That is the energy of this moon: ripeness. The recognition of what is ready. The act of gathering.
