Summer & Winter Solstice
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The Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere and the Winter Solstice in the Southern hemisphere are occurring on 21st June 2019, or close to this date depending on which time zone you live in, e.g. in Sydney, Australia, it takes place in the early morning hours of the 22nd of June.
The solstices are extremely important dates in China, despite China’s vast use of the Lunar Calendar, also referred to as the Farmer’s Calendar [nong li农历]. In summary, the Chinese year is divided into 24 Seasonal Nodes or Solar Terms [jie qi节气]. This system includes eight cadences, the two solstices, 
the two equinoxes and the beginnings [li 立] of the four seasons [1], known as Eight Nodes [ba jie 八节]. To break it down, the winter solstice, on a day to day basis, corresponds to midnight, the summer solstice to midday and the two equinoxes to the twilights occurring at dusk and dawn. The solstices and the equinoxes could also be likened to the four cardinal directions of the compass, i.e. South, North, West and East, as well as the four Earthly Branches of Zi [子], Wu [午], Mao [卯] and You [酉]. The corresponding two-hour time slots of 5-7am, 11am-1pm, 5-7pm and 11pm-1am are fixed intervals during which scriptures are sung in Daoist temples, for instance the Morning Scripture [zao ke 早课] is recited and chanted at Mao-time [5-7am].
Our teacher and abbot of the Five Immortals Temple, ,Li Shifu, described the eight cadences as special windows and portals, when Yin and Yang are in dynamic exchange and their powers can be harnessed through meditation and the cultivation of stillness.
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[1] One of those beginnings is the Beginning of Spring [li chun 立春]. A previous post of Purple Cloud Institute covered this topic, reproduced below:
It is a traditional custom in rural China that upon the arrival of spring a hole is dig deep in the ground and a barrel is flipped upside down and placed inside. Then a hole is carved into the bottom and chicken feather placed on the barrel. When the chicken feather moves, the spring of qi has truly arrived. This is the most fortuitous time to light firecrackers to ensure favourable weather for a bumper harvest [feng tiao yu shun, wu gu feng deng風調雨順、五穀豐登]. Ideally this was performed on flat land at sea level, as it would take the Yang Qi [陽氣] of Spring longer to rise in a higher area with uneven surfaces.
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Post Scriptum I: Both Stonehenge, in England, and Newgrange, in Ireland, are carefully aligned with the sunset and sunrise of the Winter Solstice respectively.
Post-Scriptum II: The significance of the solstices is furthermore underlined by the name of a Chinese medicine called Two-Solstice-Pill [er zhi wan 二至丸]. The name was selected in reverence of the two ingredients’ -Nü Zhen Zi [女贞子] & Mo Han Lian [旱莲草]- harvest time. Nü Zhen Zi is picked near the furthest point or utmost point [zhi 至] of Yin, namely the winter solstice, whereas Mo Han Lian is collected near the utmost point of Yang, which is the summer solstice.
