The dark of the moon is this coming Wednesday, the 19^th of the month, and the first dark moon after Samhain. In my personal spiritual practice, this is the beginning of the turn of the sacred wheel of the seasons.

This year in my creative practice, I want to look away from human ways of reckoning time with clocks and calendars, and look instead to the cycles of time as marked by the land and the heavens.

I love the cycles of the seasons, watching the world around me change throughout the year in ways that are both the same and different each year. When do the colors begin to change, when is the first frost (if we even really get one), when do the first snowdrops poke up from the earth, how long does it take those tiny green shoots to rise and bud and unfurl their sweet white blossoms? The way some shifts seem to happen in agonizingly slow evolution, while others seem to speed through their phases with lightning speed, never ceases to amaze me. This beauty and wonder is what I hope to capture in my art this week.

Questions to ponder:

Are you familiar with the seasonal and astronomical cycles in your specific location? Do those cycles match up with the way the seasons tend to be portrayed in art and entertainment, or are they different? 

What’s happening in the natural world around you as you contemplate this prompt? What energy and emotion does it evoke in you? 

Do you have certain activities you repeat each year in a cyclical way? If so, do you enjoy them, or do you only do them out of habit?

If you enjoy these traditions, what are some things you love about them?

If you don’t enjoy them … could you stop? If you don’t think you can stop, why not? Realistically speaking, what would happen if you stopped?

Is there a new activity you’d like to try in response to this point on the sacred wheel of the seasons? If so, what would you need to do in order to do it?

Photo by Mario Dobelmann, courtesy of Unsplash.

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