image: sunset at Great Serpent Mound, 06/17/2017; photo looking towards coiled tail and setting sun beyond -- body of Serpent stretches towards right of photo and curves back towards setting sun.

image: sunset at Great Serpent Mound, 06/17/2017; photo looking towards coiled tail and setting sun beyond -- body of Serpent stretches towards right of photo and curves back towards setting sun.

I've just returned from a wonderful visit to the Great Serpent Mound and the Summer Solstice Celebration 2017, hosted by Friends of the Serpent Mound.

It was a privilege to have had the opportunity to give a presentation at this year's event. It was also a real blessing to hear the other speakers as well as talented artists and musicians over the weekend. 

Especially moving was the Native flute music of Joseph Whitefeather Mato (read more here).

I also very much enjoyed the music of the talented Steve Free and Susan Sammons, some of which also featured Native flute, in addition to guitar, harmonica, a variety of percussion, and incredible harmony on vocals.

And I also was very grateful for the wisdom shared by Michael BastineYaz Garcia and Tim Tussing, and of course Ross Hamilton and Graham Hancock -- along with many others.

The Great Serpent Mound itself, which I had never previously visited, was incredible. I had the opportunity to examine it in some detail, guided by Jeffrey Wilson and Ross Hamilton, both of whom have done extremely in-depth work to discover its multiple layers of alignments, correspondences to specific constellations, correspondences to specific Native American myths and traditions, and what all these connections may signify. 

And I also had some time to explore the Serpent Mound alone and to contemplate it in silence.

In addition to all of these blessings, I had the additional blessing of reuniting with a close friend from West Point, whom I had not seen since we were teaching in different departments at the Academy, more than fifteen years ago.

Now that the Summer Solstice Celebration at the Serpent Mound has come to an end for this year, the actual moment of the June solstice is fast approaching. In approximately twenty hours, the earth will swing past the point at which the north pole will point most directly towards the sun (at 9:24 pm Pacific time in North America, on June 20, which is 12:24 am Eastern time in North America, on June 21, or 04:24 am in Greenwich, England, also on June 21). 

If you are able to make your way to the Great Serpent Mound, or to one of the many other ancient sacred sites around our planet which incorporate celestial alignments to help us to align the patterns of our lives here below with the heavenly cycles up above, I would strongly encourage you to do so. But, no matter where you are on our beautiful globe, I hope that you can contemplate the significance of the great stations of the year, and find a way to align with those heavenly motions in some way.

Below for your convenience are a few selected blog posts from the past which deal with the significance of the summer solstice.

image: looking downhill towards the head of Great Serpent Mound, from the outside edge of the second full "closed-to-the-east" hairpin curve in the body of the Serpent (the middle of three such "closed-to-the-east" curves), 06/17/2017. 

image: looking downhill towards the head of Great Serpent Mound, from the outside edge of the second full "closed-to-the-east" hairpin curve in the body of the Serpent (the middle of three such "closed-to-the-east" curves), 06/17/2017.