Mark Green's Atheopaganism Blog

The sky has gone hard blue now, and the fog cycle has begun to stutter. Summer is leaving, it’s in the air, and I can feel the good cozy days of colored leaves and the spooky season on the horizon. The angle of the light has changed, the full blaze of the solstice is far behind, and here in the season of Dimming, we have warm, wan, still days before us for awhile yet.

Ironically, this is a time of year that feels kind of pregnant to me, even though it is headed towards the dying of the year: it is the burgeoning growth of the Sacred Dark, a fertile time of underground, internal growth and change, of decomposition, yes, but also recomposition into new forms. The year fades, dries up, the leaves fall, we gather up the harvests, and then a sudden bursting-forth of cobwebs and skulls and gravestones and bats and jack o’lanterns declares the Sacred Dark begun.

Today will be hot. There was fog, but it burned off early and we will probably see temperatures in the 90s. But it’s a different hot than beginning-of-July hot, which is usually formed by high-pressure “heat domes” forming over our region. This is still, wan, somehow laconic heat, with antique-seeming light.

It’s a good time for celebrating what has been achieved over the past cycle (as we do at the Harvest Sabbath in September), for reviewing what didn’t work and identifying that which probably isn’t worth trying again. And for getting ready for a nice, long rest after Hallows.

August; the doldrums, the slack tide, the slow and lazy eddy.

Lovely, really.