🕯️Rituals and Eclipses🌒

...plus musings on harvest time and when the seasons change

Dear you,

Welcome to this slightly belated New Moon edition of Moontime Musings. If you work in schools or know children or young adults who are back to school this week - I hope it’s all gone as well as it can. And if you know children or young adults who aren’t back to school this week, I send you all a big hug too and hope that today’s sunshine and warmth brings some joy for the weekend ahead.

Before we dive in here are some terrestrial and celestial events for September:

3 September: New Harvest 02:55 BST Moon in Virgo

6-15 September: Heritage Open Days (U.K)

9-22 September: Fairtrade Fortnight

17 September: Mooncake or Mid-Autumn Festival

18 September: Full Harvest Super Moon in Pisces at 03:34 BST

18 September: Eclipse season begins

18 September: Partial Lunar Eclipse in Pisces 03:45 BST

Sun remains in Virgo until 22 September

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🌍The first half of this newsletter looks at the terrestrial - the news and events that are happening on Earth over the next few weeks. The second half looks at the celestial - what’s going on up in the skies.

🕯️Rituals for Autumn

I’ve just finished reading Zoe Gilbert’s brilliant book ‘Folk’ which tells of a community living entwined with nature in the fictional village of Neverness. One tale that particularly stuck with me was that of the gorse maze, which bookends the story. The girls of the village stitch their name onto a ribbon, attach it to a bow and fire it into the gorse. The boys run the gorse maze, seeking an arrow and the one whose name is stitched upon the arrow they retrieve, receives a kiss. Once all of the bows have been retrieved, the gorse is set alight.

Much like the folklore surrounding Beltane, this story stirred something inside me around annual rituals rooted in the more-than-human world which we are increasingly disconnected from. This said, there are whisperings of rewilding out there, and one that I heard just on Wednesday evening from some garden designers from Denver, Colorado. In their new book, Shrouded in Light, the authors celebrate the ‘raw beauty and wild otherness’ of shrubs and laud the virtues of gorse as a wild shrubland species which we should honour and celebrate.

As the days grow shorter, and the weather chillier, I turn to rituals for Autumn to keep me grounded and connected to nature. I’m currently dreaming up a new offering for others who wish to prepare for the darker months ahead with tangible simple practices which can be woven into the days, weeks and months. If you’d like to be kept in the loop, please leave your email below.

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🌦️Seasons

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the different times to mark the changing seasons and this is a subject I’ve been musing on a lot in this first week of September. Meteorologists split the 12 months of the Gregorian calendar year up into 4 seasons each spanning 3 months:

Autumn: September-November; Winter: December-February; Spring: March-May and Summer: June-August.

The astronomical calendar sees things a little differently with the seasons turning almost 3 weeks later: