When we think about the tides of the seasons, how the spirit of each Sabbat waxes into our lives and wanes out, so much of the associations or practices that we read about in witchyliterature revolve around the weather patterns of Europe. As a result, when you live in southern California, what we see and feel outside doesn’t always line up with what we think the seasonal tide should feel like. Especially now at Yuletide, we still have 80 degree days and a fresh flush of green life spreads over the hills and trails. Open any book about the wheel of the year or seasonal tides and traditions, and we’re looking at cold depths of winter, blankets of snow, austerity, community-as-survival, long dark nights and candles flickering into them. It can feel a little frustrating to reach for the cozy vibes of Yule when you’re sweating through your ugly Christmas sweater.

Wherever I am, when I want to connect with the seasonal tide of the land that’s holding me up, I look at the plants and trees. On my oak-lined street, I keep the windows open October though December to hear the acorns dropping onto the asphalt, little wooden pops and bounces that ground me into a season that, for the animals around me, means abundance and life. But harvest was supposed to be at Mabon! These squirrels are doing it wrong! My Llewellyn planner says that everything is supposed to be sleeping or telling tales by the fires!

Try telling that to the neon green of the mustard just starting to cover the hillsides. Tell it to the wild cucumber waking up and coiling out from its tubers after sleeping warm underground all summer, awakened by the November rains. Tell it to the nasturtiums and sweet healthy plant the year before, successful in its seed-making cycle, dying and rising through the seasons. But shouldn’t we only see sprouting at Ostara? How do we reconcile the unmistakeable sight, smell, and spirit of life pouring forth now, when it’s supposed to be mound time, dark time, cling to community to make it through the winter time?

When you walk the path of a witch, there is no shortage of chances to practice holding many things at once, living in liminal spaces that are neither here nor there, continually seeking the unbalanced, living, breathing, pulsing moments of motion between fixed points. This is not always a comfortable way to be; non-witches are mostly seeking those fixed points and staying put for safety and comfort. But we want most of our lives to be swinging in those moments of motion, because motion is evolution. Motion is power, motion is life. Here, now, it doesn’t look like the Yuletide of snow and ice, nor fruitful spring or summer. So when we go out and see, feel, and smell the life rising in the land that holds us, when we are “supposed” to be retreated inward and the land is “supposed” to be dead, what can that tell us?

It reminds me of the complexity of mound time. It reminds me that as I retreat inward and reflect on the year past and bring the watery visions of my year to come into focus, the sprouts of that year are already here. It feels like I am swimming in all that was and all that is to come, all at the same time, in a cauldron of stars, seeds, earth, bones, fruit. In this land, something awakens in this tide, just as something awakens within us when we go into the mound and commune with the dark. Welcome the chance to learn something from the land, instead of trying to force it to align with something it’s not.