Category: Seasonal Celebration
Autumn is the Dying
If Winter means death, then Autumn is the dying. In our culture, death is often synonymous with dread. Like late blight to tomatoes, it seems devastatingly final and achingly unfair. But the idea that dying is an event to be feared is a very human story, and one we have only recently started telling…
Allowing on a Late Summer Day
There is a specific slant to the late afternoon sun that floods my living room with a cast-iron butter of deeply heated light. It’s always that last stretch of sunshine that seems to glow the hottest. In the downward arch of day, the fever of collected sunshine gathers like a stove coil around the…
Summer’s Fullness
On the other side of the strawberry moon, after the late spring blossoms of Beltane and the thick pulses of Hawthorn blooms arises a season that weaves itself around the helm of a single word – fullness. At this point in the season the full arrival of summer is undeniable. Roses are spilled like…
Spring Ephemerals + the Magic of Vulnerability
I walked through the warm woods barefoot to the cleft of hill overlooking the stream. Following the old worn way through the trees, the thin stitch of footfall over a soft quilt of pine-worn leaves. It was one of the first sun-warmed days of spring and I was opening my heart to finding something…
Samhain: Practices + Reflections
Today the world is lost to its own thought. This morning found the last russets of maple leaves scattered beneath the trees and tonight we’re expecting our first killing freeze. It is Samhain, and the consciousness of the earth feels as fluid as the shadowy iridescence of a raven’s wing. Samhain, the ancient Gaelic…
Autumn Melancholy + Saturnian Journeys
It is late October, and the peak of the Equinox has come and gone. The fields are golden with constellations of butter-colored squash and dried corn, and every day the light grows dimmer. In the wheel of the year, autumn is a time of both extravagant wealth and liberating death. As the days curl…
Summertime Leisure
This past weekend I let myself be free. At around 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday I pushed all my lingering work in a drawer, packed the car with a basket of food and my favorite blanket, and drove west into the sea-blue mountains. I stopped often, taking time to dip in…
Gentle Spring // Cleansing
This year’s spring has been a revelation, sweet and slow. The mountains here held winter much longer than usual—we’ve even seen April snows. Crocuses were the first to awaken, scattered across a wild lawn by the lake. It was such a welcome sight, I stopped my car in the middle of the road….
