It has been eleven weeks since I last truly sat down and journaled. Eleven weeks since I stopped long enough to put pen to paper and listen to the noise inside my own head. Ten of those weeks I have been off with my arm, and somehow, when I look back now, that stretch of time feels both impossibly long and gone in the blink of an eye. Summer seems to have slipped past while I wasn't looking. The light has already begun to change. The evenings are arriving a little earlier, there is something different in the air, and the trees are standing on the edge of their transformation. Soon green will give way to amber, crimson and gold, and the leaves that spent an entire season reaching toward the sun will simply let go.
And holy crap, so much has happened.
Somehow, in the middle of pain, frustration, uncertainty and a body that forced me to slow down, another part of me did the exact opposite. I created. Almost relentlessly. I finished and published my second book. I watched another piece of the strange little world that has lived inside my imagination become something real that I could actually hold in my hands. I created new artwork. I changed the entire feeling surrounding Whispers Through the Veil, pulling the threads tighter between my books, my paintings, my creations and this dark little universe that has somehow grown around all of them. I closed the doors on my old website and built an entirely new online store from the ground up. I learned things I never particularly wanted to learn, swore at my computer more times than I could count, changed things until they felt right, changed them again because suddenly they didn't, and obsessed over details that probably no other human being on earth would ever notice.
Somewhere in that whirlwind, I completely missed Lughnasadh.
My favourite celebration on the Wheel of the Year came and went almost without me noticing.
That realization hit me harder than I expected. Because I love that part of the year. I love what it represents—the first harvest, the warmth of late summer, the feeling of abundance before the world begins its slow descent toward autumn. And yet I had become so consumed with finishing the book, building the store, creating artwork, preparing for the book launch and getting everything exactly the way I imagined it for the upcoming Halloween market that I barely looked up long enough to notice the season changing around me. I had become so obsessed with creating the world I wanted that, for a little while, I forgot to stand inside the one I already had.
Maybe that is why Mabon feels different this year.
Tomorrow, September 22, the wheel turns again. Light and darkness stand together at the threshold, balanced for one brief moment before the darker half of the year begins to take hold. The leaves will change. The gardens will quiet. The fields will empty. Animals will gather what they need and prepare themselves for the cold months ahead. The earth will begin drawing its energy inward, not because it has failed to grow, but because it has grown enough. There is wisdom in that. Something I think I desperately needed to remember.
Maybe the timing of all of this wasn't an accident.
I have always believed that God and the Universe have my best interests in mind, even when I have absolutely no idea what they're doing. And there have certainly been moments during these past eleven weeks when I have wondered what the hell they were doing. There have been silent battles that never made it onto social media. Thoughts that weren't kind. Fear. Pressure. Frustration. Moments when everything felt enormous and I felt very small underneath it. There were days when my body wouldn't cooperate with what my mind wanted to accomplish and days when my own expectations became heavier than anything I was physically carrying.
But perhaps even those moments had a purpose.
Because when I look back now, I don't see eleven empty weeks lost to an injury. I see a field I didn't realize I was planting.
Every page I finished was a seed. Every painting, every product, every photograph, every late night staring at my computer, every ridiculous Shopify problem I eventually figured out, every idea scribbled down somewhere before I forgot it, every moment when I wanted to quit but tried one more time anyway—I was planting. Even through the doubt. Even through the frustration. Even when I couldn't see anything growing yet.
And now Mabon has arrived.
The harvest.
Perhaps this season isn't asking me what I am going to create next. Perhaps it is asking me to finally look around at what I have already grown.
There is a second book sitting where once there were only unfinished pages. There is an online store where there was once only an idea. There is artwork that didn't exist eleven weeks ago. There are candles and jewelry and strange little treasures scattered around my workspace waiting for their place in the world. There is an entire Halloween market and book launch on the horizon that I have spent months imagining. There are pieces of myself woven through all of it—my stories, my hands, my mistakes, my stubbornness, my ridiculous attention to detail, my imagination and probably a fair amount of swearing.
The field isn't empty.
It is full.
And perhaps the lesson I need most right now is that eventually you have to stop digging up the seeds to make sure they're growing.
At some point, you have to trust the soil.
Trust the rain.
Trust the darkness.
Trust God.
Trust the Universe.
And trust yourself enough to believe that everything you poured into the earth will become whatever it was meant to become, even when you can no longer see what is happening beneath the surface. Maybe that is the hardest part of planting anything—knowing when you have done enough, when to stop tending, stop worrying, and simply let go.
Perhaps that is why there is something so beautiful about the trees this time of year. They seem to understand what I am only beginning to learn. They don't cling to their leaves simply because they spent an entire summer growing them. When the time comes, they release them to the earth and grow quiet, trusting what remains unseen. From the outside they may look bare, but beneath the surface, life is still there—resting, gathering, waiting for its season to begin again.
I think I'm finally ready for some of that.
There is still a lot ahead, and undoubtedly another idea knocking on the door of my brain at some ungodly hour. But I don't want to race through another season without noticing that I'm living inside it.
I want to watch the leaves change and hear them skitter across the pavement in the wind. I want cool mornings, dark evenings, candles burning while rain taps against the windows. I want to move inward with the season and allow myself, for once, to heal, to rest, to breathe.
And to give thanks.
Not only for the beautiful things, but for the difficult ones too. For the plans that changed, the doors that closed, the pain that altered my path and the battles fought quietly where no one else could see them. Maybe harvest isn't only about gathering what we intentionally planted. Sometimes we harvest wisdom from seasons we never asked for. Sometimes courage grows where fear was planted first. Sometimes something has to fall away before the earth beneath it can become fertile again.
Eleven weeks.
How can eleven weeks hold so much?
As Mabon arrives and the wheel turns once more, I want to stand still long enough to see what these strange, chaotic, beautiful weeks have given me—and simply say thank you. For what grew. For what stayed. For what fell away. And for whatever is still quietly taking root beneath the surface where I cannot yet see it.
The earth is beginning its long exhale, and maybe I can too.
I've planted the seeds. I've tended the field. I've given it everything I have.
Now I can let it be.
Let the leaves fall. Let the darkness come. Let the earth grow quiet.
And trust that beneath it all, something is still growing.
The wheel is turning again.
This time, I intend to turn with it. 🧡