Category: Seasonal Celebration
Walking with Ghosts
Autumn has fallen here in the mountains. The trees are turning inwards, curling their leaves into colors of copper, ember and dusk. The canopies empty in a thick caramel of fire, and suddenly that which felt obscured or far away is close and able to be perceived. There is a kind of haunting that…
Three Creative Spring Cleanses
It’s spring and the whole world is cleansing. Tender greens are rising like a blush in the woods. The song birds have returned to flit their wings on the surface of cold ponds. And the forest bathes itself in blooms. Every spring there is a feeling in the air as if everything can be…
Dadirri Days
I have always felt happiest with long hours of quietude. Days spent in contemplation, doing small mindful things like winding yarn, watching shadows or gathering stones. Ever since I was a child I yearned for such inner imaginary time, silent moments of pause when I could reflect back on my day, my mood, my life,…
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…
