I had been working on this piece all week and it was missing something. Notes about the season turning, scraps about the constellations, half-thoughts about the weight of winter. But none of it held together. Then a picture arrived from Sweden. A friend sent it: his children playing by the kitchen window while a tree outside had turned to yellow and rust. Ordinary, domestic, nothing more. It was what I needed to pull these thoughts together.
Here in Ireland autumn begins at Lughnasa, the first of August. It is the festival of the harvest, a gathering of first fruits, a reminder that the year has tipped. At Lughnasa you might miss it, since the days are still long and the air still carries summer. By September the change is plain. The hedgerows are heavy with berries, apples fall and bruise in the grass, the evenings close in. Autumn is the season of enough. The ground is generous, the air is sharp but not cruel, the fire begins to call in the grate.
I love this time. The smell of damp leaves, the sound of geese overhead, the last warm evenings that invite you to sit and watch the light go. For a while there is balance. But behind it all a thought waits. The winter is coming.
Living off-grid makes that thought more than poetic. Winter excites me and terrifies me. When the house is lit by oil lamps, darkness is not a figure of speech but a real presence that thickens around you. When the winds come, they matter. Frost matters. To live this way is to feel the season in your bones. Yet the satisfaction is real as well. To be warm and fed and clean in the middle of it is a profound contentment. It is the kind of pride that has carried people through winters for centuries.
Autumn carries us toward Samhain, the first of November, when the year enters its darkest period. It is the old threshold of winter, the place where the veil thins, where the bright harvest has given way to cold. I feel it strongly here. By Samhain there is no pretending. The dark has taken hold.
The sky carries its own version of this turn. Orion will rise again, his three belt stars drawing a line to Sirius, the brightest star of winter. They are called the Three Kings, and they do as the story says: they follow the star in the east. Near Christmas, Virgo climbs the horizon at midnight, the virgin constellation, the House of Bread. Out of her, the sun is born again at the solstice, when the nights can grow no longer and the balance tips back toward the light.
I don’t think it is coincidence that these patterns shaped the Christmas story: a virgin, three kings, a star in the east, and the promise of light returning in the heart of darkness. The gospels gave them names and places, but the heavens had already told the story. At Newgrange, five thousand years ago, people marked it in stone. Over three days at the solstice the sun enters the inner chamber and rests on the floor. For three days the sun seems to pause on its horizon point before beginning its climb toward strength. Death, waiting, and rebirth: the pattern was already there, written in light.
It is here I think of Spinoza. He lived quietly in 17th century Amsterdam, grinding lenses for telescopes, writing in solitude, cast out of his community for speaking differently about God. He believed that God was not elsewhere but everywhere, present in every star, every leaf, every season, yet also more than these things. Not pantheism, but panentheism is the word that catches it: God in all, and beyond all. To notice the order of the world, to accept its cycles, to live within them without resentment, was for him a form of devotion.
I feel a kinship with that. Living close to necessity, you learn that there is no escaping the order of the world. You gather wood and food, you light the stove, you endure what comes. And when you do, when you are secure in the middle of it, there is a sense of being aligned with something greater than yourself. Not as a miracle, but as a rhythm.
The leaves fall. The lamps glow. The nights lengthen. Orion climbs, the Three Kings follow the star, the virgin rises, the sun is born again. At Lughnasa, at Samhain, at the Solstice, the cycle continues. To notice it, and to endure within it, is already to take part in the story.
And I return to that photograph from Sweden. Two children at a kitchen window, a tree turned to yellow and rust beyond them. An ordinary moment, yet it belongs to the same rhythm as the stars, as Lughnasa and Samhain, as the solstice sun at Newgrange. The vast story of the heavens always comes back to this: how we live our days in the light and the dark, in the turning of the year, in the leaves outside our own windows.
Consilium 
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