a quiet calling...

As I’ve moved through a very transitional year for myself, I’ve continued to come back to these sabbats, these markers of time passing. And while they show the time is passing, the earth shifting and changing, they are also steadfast, constant. They continue to return to us, or we to them, season after season, year after year. They offer us a return - to ourselves, to the earth - a moment to let go of the constant push toward progress and a breath to see the beauty of an ever-changing landscape. From each blade of grass, to the birds in our trees, to the leaves at the end of the branches. The frost that blankets the earth, the flowers that begin to peak as the sun fills our sky... longer and longer and longer, then less and less and less. In Midwinter we feel hope and security in the promise of the return of light, and in the heat of summer a longing for the slowness and retreat that is promised to come as that light fades again. Promised change, steadfast patterns. We have so much to learn from our natural world.
My own journey of discovery of these markers of time, of living and breathing with the seasons, has ebbed and flowed, yet I’ve continued to find solace and peace in the practice of following. And in this following, I’ve found that the earth and its cycles has so much to reveal to us, if we let it, if we slow down enought to see and listen. Through this practice of seasonality, of slowing down, grounding down, and flowing with and through the earth, we can find a more natural way of living, a simpler, humbler, truer way of being, a way of being that is with and of nature. We are nature. We’ve busied our little selves, created distractions, pretend we are not, forgotten what our ancestors knew to be true, but we are of nature. And when we slow down, ground down, get gentle with ourselves and send our roots down into the earth again, when we let nature show us how to change, how of balance, we can find a deeper peace and truth to our own sense of belonging in this place. 
I have held my practices of moving and living with the sabbats close over the years, never really sharing them, but I have been feeling the urge to reach out and offer my hand so that we may walk together. I’m hearing from all over that a heavy sadness has been sinking in - a sadness at our disconnection, a loneliness we have created as a society, a low murmur of anxiety over all our distractions and problems we’ve created for ourselves. And gosh I feel it too. But when I slow down and ebb and flow with the earth, I feel an ease, I sense something deeper and truer that speaks to our existence as human beings. And so in all of this, I’ve felt an urge to reach out, to take a bigger leap and share, facilitate, and reach for more connection with each other and our earth.