Between Mabon and Samhain

Mabon always sneaks up on me.

Not because I don’t know it’s coming. I know perfectly well how calendars work. But September starts out still pretending to be summer, and I usually go along with it. The afternoons are warm, the doors are open, everything is still green enough, and I’m perfectly willing to believe we have plenty of time left.

Then one morning I walk outside and something is different.

It’s usually the light I notice first. The sun sits lower and the shadows stretch farther across the ground. The air has changed too. It smells like dry grass, cooling dirt and leaves that haven’t actually turned yet but seem to be considering their options. You can stand there in a T-shirt with the afternoon temperature headed toward eighty and still know.

There you are.

Mabon.

That brief balance point on the Wheel when day and night meet almost evenly before darkness starts taking a little more territory every evening.

There are plenty of things we’re apparently supposed to do with Mabon. Give thanks. Celebrate abundance. Gather the harvest. Light candles. Arrange apples attractively on a wooden table while looking spiritually fulfilled.

I like apples as much as the next person, but what fascinates me more is what happens after Mabon.

Because Mabon doesn’t really feel like a destination. It feels like someone quietly opened a door.

On the other side is Samhain.

The walk between the two is only a handful of weeks, but watch what happens.

At Mabon, the trees are mostly still dressed. Flowers are hanging on, insects are carrying on with their tiny insect business, and there are afternoons warm enough to convince you that summer might stick around awhile longer. The windows are open. Dinner can still happen outside. You might grab a sweater after dark, but mostly because you forgot what sixty degrees feels like after spending three months complaining about ninety.

Then the Wheel starts moving.

Not dramatically. Nobody rings a bell. There is no official announcement from the maple tree.

A few leaves change.

The mornings get colder.

You notice it’s dark earlier than it was last week.

One night you close the windows before bed. A few days later you leave them closed. The soup pot comes out. The blanket appears on the couch. Somewhere along the way you turn on the heat and immediately become outraged that apparently we’re paying for that again.

Meanwhile the trees go completely insane.

They spend months standing there in essentially the same outfit, then suddenly decide they have three weeks to become magnificent, drop everything they own in the yard and stand naked until April.

By Samhain, I can walk outside and stand in exactly the same place where I stood at Mabon and be looking at an entirely different world.

I’ve watched this happen my whole life.

It still surprises me.

Maybe because I’m not actually watching the same autumn come back.

I’ve never seen this autumn before.

Neither have you.

We talk about the Wheel of the Year as though the seasons return to us. Spring comes back. Summer comes back. Mabon comes back. Samhain comes back.

But they don’t, really.

The dates return. The pattern returns. The Earth reaches the familiar places in its journey and does what it has been doing since long before any human decided the occasion needed a name.

But we aren’t standing still waiting for it.

The woman who stood here last Mabon had no idea what would happen between there and here. She probably had plans.

That’s adorable.

Some happened. Some didn’t. Other things came barreling through the front door without bothering to knock. There were wonderful days, terrible days and a ridiculous number of completely ordinary Tuesdays. Things mattered that don’t matter anymore. Things I barely noticed became important. People changed. Circumstances changed. I changed.

Not because I spent the year courageously “doing the work.”

I was busy living.

That’s enough to do it.

And maybe that’s what I love about this stretch between Mabon and Samhain. You can actually watch time happening.

Not clock time. Real time.

The kind written across trees and gardens and migrating birds. Our ancestors watched it because they had to. The changing light wasn’t seasonal decoration. It told them when to gather, when to preserve, when to prepare and when the easy abundance of summer was finished.

They didn’t need a notification telling them autumn had arrived. The world told them.

The light told them.

The fields told them.

The animals told them.

And despite our thermostats, electric lights, grocery stores and remarkable ability to ignore the sky while checking a weather app to find out what the sky is doing, some part of us still notices.

I do.

After Mabon, I want different food. I start closing windows. I notice the darkness coming earlier. I find myself standing outside a little longer on a warm evening because something in me understands there won’t be many evenings exactly like this left.

Not forever.

Just this year.

Because somewhere on the road between Mabon and Samhain, summer doesn’t simply end.

This summer ends.

This particular collection of mornings, dinners, dogs barking, conversations, bills, laughter, arguments, plans, disappointments and stupid little moments nobody thought were important enough to photograph.

They happened.

And now the Wheel moves on.

I don’t think we have to turn that into a lesson. We don’t have to release what no longer serves us, identify three areas of personal growth or emerge transformed by Halloween. Thank God, because I have enough to do.

Maybe this part of the Wheel is powerful simply because it’s impossible not to see it happening.

At Mabon the world is one way.

By Samhain it will be another.

And somewhere during those weeks, without ceremony or permission, we’ll change too.

That’s the strange thing about walking the Wheel year after year. We recognize the road. We’ve smelled this air before. We’ve watched these leaves turn and felt these cold mornings arrive. We know what’s waiting around the bend.

But we’ve never walked it this time.

The Wheel doesn’t repeat itself.

It returns.

And every time it does, it finds someone slightly different standing there to meet it.

Mabon and Samhain may occupy the same places on the Wheel every year.

We don’t.