The Turning
I only take what is already over. Hand it to me, and I will hand you what comes next.
Who they are
A noblewoman of both courts at once — Seelie down one side, Unseelie down the other. Hawthorn blossom foams on her blooming half; bare twigs and blood-red haws ride the wintered one, and her wings don't match either: monarch on the May side, bare membrane on the dark. She stands where she has always stood, on the hilltop hinge between the Beltane fire and the Samhain mist, beside the stone that marks the sun's turning — because the old year had two faces, light and dark, and someone has to keep the hinge oiled. She is not cruel. She is punctual.
Drawn upright — the teaching
Things end so the next thing can begin — that is the wheel turning, not a punishment. The job, the love, the version of yourself that got you this far: each one has a season, and the season ending is not a verdict on you. Fighting the turn is how people miss their own spring.
The working
At the turn of a season — one of the four fire-festivals if you can, the honest turn of your own life if you can't — build a small fire. A hearth, a fire-bowl, one candle in a dish will do. Write what is over on a dry leaf — the name, the single word — and give it to the flame. Say it once; this is not a eulogy. Let it burn all the way — don't pull it out half-charred, that is how hauntings start. Then speak the next thing's name into the smoke, because smoke rises and carries. Last, light one fresh candle from the embers, the way the old households rekindled their hearths from the festival blaze: the new fire, taken honestly from the old.
Drawn reversed — the shadow
You are pouring your life into something already finished — a love, a job, an old self — and forcing it past its season doesn't preserve it. It rots it, and you with it.
The undoing
Carry the dead thing to the Samhain dark — or the nearest dark moon, the wheel is patient. Bring its token: the letter, the photo, the key. Name it once, plainly, and then stop tending its fire — literally: let a candle burn down beside it and do not relight it, and in the morning sweep the cold ash out the door. What you keep alive past its time keeps you from what is trying to be born.
Its tree · the ogham
Beith — the birch. The first letter of the ogham, and the first tree to come back after a burn. White bark that peels and lets go, endlessly. The old alphabet starts with the tree of beginnings for a reason: everything readable begins after something burned.
Sit with this
What are you still watering that has already died? And what is waiting, right now, for the ground it's standing on?