A Steamy Autumn Morning

The world is an astounding place, especially when you’re up for the sunrise.

(If you’re up for the sunrise because a migraine woke you from a sound sleep with the hot pain of a thousand blazing swords stabbing into your brain, well, this is sometimes the price we pay for getting to live in a world with so many things worth waking up to.)

Some modern Druids and Celtic polytheists celebrate Samhain on the day of the first frost. And so the first morning in autumn that I wake up to find the land crisp with crystallized mist clinging to each blade of grass, edging each fallen leaf… that is a sacred morning.

On such mornings, when breath hangs in the air with every shivery sigh and steam rises from the quiet streams that ripple through the landscape, it’s easy to understand why our ancestors spoke of the veil between the worlds growing thin. Even as the trees drop their leaves and the land grows still, the earth seems alive with spirit. What gentlest of movements could part that veil of mist, could bring us suddenly fingertip to fingertip with the Otherworld.

We live in a world of concrete and plastic and glass these days, but still on a morning like this, I can feel the mists rising, the veil parting. I’m still astounded by the strangeness I see around me. Like the frost melting to dew in the warmth of the rising sun, and the patio furniture outside the local Panera steaming like a hot-blooded beast:

The world is alive. You are alive. Remember.

Image Credits:
• “Fog, Fall, Geese,” by Kellar Wilson (CC) [source]
• “Steamy Autumn Morning” video by Alison Leigh Lilly