Solara, a new word for a world on fire

Reflections on the Summer Solstice

Traditionally, the 21st of June is the summer solstice. I used to honour it in one way but now find myself speaking of it differently.

Over the past year, I've been quietly rewriting the seasons; the celebrations, the solstices, the equinoxes. Giving them new names.

Not to discard the past, we are shaped by it, but because the old words no longer speak to the world/we are entering.

A world that, in living memory, none of us has inhabited. A world that is, quite literally, on fire.

I call this day Solara now.

A name that rose from the old Latin sol, meaning "sun," but it carries more than etymology. It carries weight. Radiance. Risk.

Solara isn't just a celebration. It's a reckoning.

An acknowledgement of the sun not as a symbol but as the source of all energy, all weather, and all growth.

The brilliance that ripens fruit and chars the soil.

The heat that wakes seeds and withers crops.

The force that makes life possible and makes it precarious.

We've long bowed to the sun in myth and ritual. But Solara speaks to a different knowing. A scientific clarity.

The truth is that every green leaf, every breath of oxygen, and every beat of this warming world begins with fire.

It is the sun that sustains us.

And it is the sun that could undo us.

Solara is the name I've given to hold both.

The light and the burn.

The gift and the warning.

I didn't plan any of this. I didn't sit down to craft a new cosmology. I just started writing and sharing.

What surprised me was how deeply the work around Domei had landed with others. It seems to name something many have felt but lacked words for.

Not a system, not a method. An approach. Just a way of coming back to the body, to the senses, to the world as it is.

I coined the word from Gaelic roots: domhain (deep) and éist (listen).

To me, Domei is a deep, sensory form of attention. It's how I meet the world now.

Not through the mind alone but through felt presence. A body-based way of being that arose not from theory but from necessity.

And I want to be clear. Domei doesn't replace other frameworks. It stands alongside them.

I'm not knocking mindfulness, or shamanism, or any other path. I've had some angry emails suggesting I am. I'm not.

I'm simply saying: this isn't those things.

Domei isn't mindfulness. It's not plant spirit medicine. I don't use the language of spirits in my work. That doesn't mean others shouldn't. It just means this is different.

I notice how brittle belief can become when people get triggered by that difference.

That defensiveness often points to something deeper. And I understand it. I've been there. I used to live from that place of righteous certainty.

But certainty is a dangerous thing.

I need something to hold onto, especially now, as war drums sound in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Domei is that for me. A thread I can follow through the chaos.

As an artist, I have to put this into form. If I don't, it consumes me. The fire turns inward. It burns me up.

So I speak, write, and offer my thoughts, not because I have answers, but because I don't.

I have a practice and know what happens when I don't attend it.

In recent months, I've watched as people lash out, shaming others for not protesting against the war, not being loud enough, not being 'on the right side.'

I know that place. I came from there. I was a street-fighting activist as a young man. Angry. Raw. Unprocessed. Projecting my own pain onto the world.

It took decades to recognise that. And part of why I spiralled into addiction was because I didn't know what to do with that pain.

In 2016, I wrote a prose poem called Foraging as an Act of Reverence. In it, I said:

"If we protest, we must do so with a kind, loving, open heart. The exact opposite of how we might feel at the injustices done in the name of progress and civilisation."

It's not easy, it's the hardest thing in the world, but anything else repeats the cycle.

I was violated as a boy. I've never hidden that. And for years, every act of violence I saw in the world echoed that original violence. I didn't know it then.

But in recovery, I had to learn what forgiveness really meant. And it took everything I had.

Forgiveness isn't about letting the perpetrator off the hook. It's about turning the gaze inward.

Forgiving myself. For how I survived. For how I lashed out. For how I mirrored what I didn't understand. And something strange happened.

When I truly forgave myself, my relationship to the past changed. Its heat cooled. The shadows lifted. I came to peace, not forgetting, not excusing, but peace.

That shift changed everything. Because until I made peace with myself, I kept re-enacting the wound. Kept seeing enemies in every direction. Kept projecting.

And so when I see people weaponising language, "You're either with us or against us", I recognise the fear beneath it. The pain. The powerlessness. I've lived that.

I've learned that it doesn't lead where we think it will. Real change doesn't come from shame. It comes from presence, kindness, and compassion.

The first step in the 12-step recovery model is admitting you're powerless. That your life has become unmanageable. I don't work the programme anymore (I have other practices I do), but I carry that step with me.

Because once I admitted I was powerless, not intellectually but viscerally, in my bones, something opened up; not despair, but acceptance.

And that's what Domei offers me.

Not escape.

Not transcendence.

But radical presence.

A return to the body. To breath. To the more-than-human world.

And from that place, I can begin to meet the world's madness with something other than my own.

This isn't about having it all figured out. I don't.

But Domei isn't about perfection.

It's about practice.

It's about showing up. Again and again.

In the mud. In the noise. In the not-knowing.

I don't believe systemic change comes from railing and blaming.

It comes from stillness.

From compassion.

From daring to meet the whole of ourselves, the beautiful, the broken, the buried. All of it. Held, like a frightened child, in our own arms.

People write, 'This is lovely, but how do we get real change'.

And I want to say that this is real change. This is the work, the quiet work, the root-deep work.

And no, it might not be enough to stop the fires.

But it might be enough to keep us human.

So, if you've been reading Domei as just another poetic framework, stop.

Go do the practices.

Step outside.

Sit with a plant.

Let your senses lead.

Don't think your way in.

Feel your way forward.

That's the only way any of this makes sense to me.

On this solstice day, the traditional time to gather glasswort/marsh samphire, after the tide has washed it twice, I'm off to a wedding.

The light has already begun its slow retreat. But today, there is sun. Kind of where I live.

May your day be peaceful.

May your weekend be quiet.

Even if the storm continues in the human world, may there be one place in you that stays still.

Talk soon,
Robin

P.S. Feel free to share this essay through your networks. Thanks.