Stealing Stitches ~ A Samhain Interlude.

After a weeks break for Samhain (Halloween), we are back at school. Outside the window, there is a tree who is clinging to the last of its leaves, just on that bit that hangs over the garden. Rust, orange, yellow, green, fluttering merrily in the wind, and each day when I leave to go home, my car is festooned with them and it makes me immensely happy. The day before Ophelia I rushed to the woods, sure the trees would lose their splendid autumnal frippery in the following winds, but miraculously they didn't, and I have spent the last few weeks eyes skyward at every turn, filling them, drinking in that yellow and rust and orange, saving it for those dark winters evenings when the world rests in greys and browns, and I can close my eyes and find it there, that warmth. We are blessed to live in a place that is made up of winding roads lined with beautiful broadleaf trees both old and new.

Daily I wrestle with time, feeling as though it does not belong to me yet demanding that it does, stealing stitches, one at a time, pushing the needle determinedly in and out, making, creating new things where before there was only thread and fabric and vague notions wisping around my head or somewhere over my shoulder, there behind me where I cannot quite see them except perhaps out of the corner of my eye. (You know the way some things you cannot look directly at, instead approach gently, sideways. Innocently.) But eventually, those individual stitches begin to add up, become something, and take on a life of their own.
And they begin to tell a story...

So many things in my life can be added up like this, things created a stitch at a time, things big and small, things that felt frustratingly slow or simply not any-thing until the whole cloth is revealed. Whether it's one of my stitcherys like this one that took me forever, or a big project like our school that seems impossible until suddenly, look! we've done it.

Samhain brings many things for me, my favourite time of year. As soon as the clocks go back it's as though we slip in to a different world, under cover of the growing dark, shadows and hidden things become more present in our days, and we find the time to sit with whatever awaits us once the distracting summer sparkle drifts away.

Outside the window in the fading light, the children bounce in the leaves on the trampolines, barefoot, hooded, their voices high and excited, glad to be back, bringing the cold air in with them and their pink cheeks when they've had enough.
We are past Mabon, the equinox, now, speeding towards the shortest day.

And so we begin to slow down, savouring the darkening days as we slip comfortably into our slippers and light the fire, snuggle up together on the couch, and, as though pulling out photographs of our summer past, I mull over and examine all the threads that have been weaving together throughout the busy Doing months, pulling them together where needed, revealing the picture of what is being formed, thinking about what comes next for us.

There is work to be done over the winter months, for we have what is perhaps our biggest pot on the boil, to date. Bigger even, in some ways, than starting an alternative school ~ that is, creating a magical place to live with a bunch of kindred folks who share the same dream as we do.

There is a mountain looming ahead of us, but what lies beyond it is just too enticing to not at least try.