It feels like I’m not doing very well at the moment. Tiredness has overtaken me. It is the dark time of the year and I do not have enough time to rest. So the tiredness creeps into the weaker parts of my body, causing pain. It creeps into my mind, closing me off from the spirits that bless me.

When the last leaves fall, when the slanted light of late autumn catches the yellowing leaves of the Oak and turns his crown to gold, it is time for us to follow the call of our bodies for rest, for more sleep, for time to look at our dreams and the life that lies beneath the everyday.

Failing to do so, turning on artificial lights and keeping on going, regardless of the length of the Sun’s day, makes us tired, grumpy, sometimes even ill. But what can you do if you are paid to teach evening classes until 9pm, five hours after the Sun has set?

These last few weeks, the Goddess who walks with me has been stripping me bare. When I see myself in her light these days, I see a jewelled skeleton shining with light. She is asking me to strip down to the bare minimum and live from there. To live from the part of myself that I identify with her, since that day when she whispered in the wind: “I am your bones.”

Question now is: what is the bare minimum? I wish it could be the bare minimum from the long days of summer, when I was blessed with the opportunity to just sit, to just simply be without any obligation to even move.

Those five days were wonderful. They allowed me to just sit in the grass, to feel the breeze and watch the clouds go by. I could feel my roots in the fertile earth, sense myself grow on the land like grass, or a flower, or a tree. I felt rested and connected. It was a short-lived joy, ended by the stress of a job application process. But for quite some time afterwards I was able to hold on to that stillness, that sense of connection.

Where can I find it now? Not on facebook - that much is clear. Not in the books I read, however inspiring. Not in my work or my need to keep going with my spiritual quest. Perhaps I can re-create that time of summer, in the small pockets of time that are my own. Not, this time, to look at the exuberant light and growth of summer, but to look into the dark, into the womb of the Goddess jewelled with the stars.

What would happen if I just let myself be nothing but the bones of myself. Nothing but that white clarity and strength? What would happen if I stopped trying to be anything other than the very essence? If I stopped trying to do anything that didn’t come from there?

I can’t claim I know how to even do that. But then I wonder if the tree knows, before the season turns his crown to gold and he finds himself stripped by the passing breeze. All the tree does is be a tree, connected to his roots, aligned with the shortening days. I long to look into the dark, to see what seeds of dreams may lie there.

When I find them, I’ll let you know.