The Gathering

The Gathering

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The Gathering
The Gathering
Seasonal Sparks: 23rd October 2023
Creative Sparks

Seasonal Sparks: 23rd October 2023

Diving beneath the surface

Allegra Chapman (she/her)'s avatar
Allegra Chapman (she/her)
Oct 22, 2023
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The Gathering
The Gathering
Seasonal Sparks: 23rd October 2023
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It’s getting darker now. We’re properly into Autumn - the chill wind, the constant shift from rain to sun to rain to sun, the piles of leaves on the ground and the long shadows creeping along behind us.

Winter is reaching out with bony fingers to stroke our cheeks and playfully flick at our hair. Can you feel it? The light is fading, we’re descending into the dark months.

trees and pathway
Photo by Marek Szturc on Unsplash

What lies beneath

The sun moves into Scorpio on Monday, the secretive sign of hidden depths. This week the moon will move through meaning- and connection-seeking Aquarius, emotionally intense and sensitive Pisces, passionate and hot-headed Aries and affectionate and determined Taurus, taking us on quite an emotional ride.

We also have a lunar eclipse this week, on Saturday 28th. Whilst an eclipse obscures the light of the moon, it reveals a great deal regarding emotions and needs. This time will often tell you a lot about how you really feel in any areas that you might be uncertain, or where you may have been burying emotions, and if you’ve strayed away from the path your soul is yearning for, the universe might just give you a shove back onto it.

On Sunday, here in the UK, the clocks go back an hour. In theory, that means an extra hour of sleep… unless, like me, you have young children who refuse to be bound by this archaic custom and so will be up at what will now be 5am because yesterday it was 6am. It seems a strange practice to me, this shifting around of time (which is an arbitrary and man-made measure of the day, anyway) to try to get around the natural rhythms of the seasons instead of living within them. We didn’t start changing the clocks until the 20th century, to make better use of daylight in the mornings. Why we can’t make use of daylight an hour later instead is beyond me. I find the whole thing irritating, disturbing everyone’s sleep and messing around with our internal rhythms. However, it does demonstrate how arbitrary time is, and gives us an opportunity to ponder how we conceive of linear time - which is far from a straight line, after all.

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