Bonfire and Visions (Yearly Midsummer Repost)

Reposting my midsummer post from two years ago, with minor edits. This is one of my favorite times of the year for all the old Celtic and Ibero-celtic traditions my grandmother used to tell me about:

Celtic dolmen, Portugal (Beira Alta Region)

There's magic in the simple fountain* in my family's village. According to local legend, if a girl drinks water from it in the middle of the night on Midsummer's eve, she will dream of the man she is meant to marry. 

If you believe in the old traditions, that is.

And if you believe in these traditions, you probably would have already jumped the midsummer bonfires, maybe while holding hands with the boy in town who had stolen your heart. Because, you know, jumping the bonfire will guarantee that you will stay together forever.  And, of course, you wouldn't have forgotten to crack an egg into a glass of water to leave outside for another 'bout of pre-sunrise fortune telling.

Anything's possible on Midsummer.

A lot of this folklore is amazingly similar to Midsummer traditions throughout Europe. Generation upon generation of girls, with the help of Midsummer fountain water, dreamed of the boys they would love. Will o' the wisps were chased through forests. Magic and wonder wove into the everyday for just one night a year.

These customs are dying out with my grandparents' generation as young people move overseas or to the city, or push away "silly old superstitions." Sad, because they stretch back centuries, back to the days before Christianity replaced "Midsummer" with the feast of St. John. 

I still think the magic is still there, waiting. 

All you need to do is take a sip and believe.

*These aren't the jumping water kind-of fountains, but usually just spigots of continuously running spring water from the mountains or faucets connected to a communal well. Before modern water towers and plumbing, families who didn't have their own wells were dependent on the town fountain for their drinking/cleaning/bathing water. Many towns still test the water to make sure it's drinkable, and many fountains still run to this day.

BEA in Pictures

At the end of last month, I slipped on a comfy pair of shoes, hopped on mass transit, and made my way into New York City to attend BEA, a North American publishing industry conference.

This is so not like the Medical Device Manufacturers conference or the North American Spine Society meeting or the Association of American Orthopaedic Surgeons meeting and definitely not like the Cervical Spine Research Society meeting. The first three may have a massive number of booths that fill a venue like the Javitz, but they're mostly packed with *everyone* in suits.

Plus, no one lines up in massive lines for anything at any of the other conferences :) And none of them have practically shirtless guys hanging around a certain publisher's booth. (I felt uncomfortable passing that publisher!)

Of course, the other conferences don't have BOOOOOOKS or the awesome people who make and market them. Or my publisher or my amazing editors or my wonderful agent.

The other conferences may have me, but without the rest that BEA does, I'm just a bright drop in the bucket of black and grey suits.

This post is going to be *insanely* image-heavy. So, for the sake of computing power, sticking everything under a cut.