Mabon

This week, the light and the dark were equal.

Not for long. From Tuesday on out, the days shorten, the nights lengthen, and the world begins its descent into the darker half of the year. But for one moment, everything was in perfect balance.

That is what Mabon is. The autumn equinox. The third harvest. The threshold before the turning.

I have always loved fall. The cool air arriving like a permission slip. The colors. The particular quality of light that only exists in September and October - golden and slanted, like the world has finally exhaled. Even as a child, before I had language for any of it, fall felt like my season. Like something in me recognized it as home.

As I’ve learned more about the celestial calendar and the traditions that have marked these turning points for thousands of years, long before they were named by any single culture or claimed by any single practice, I’ve come to understand why. Mabon carries a specific energy. A moment of stillness before the descent. An invitation to look at what has been harvested before the ground goes dark.

This year, standing at that threshold, I find myself looking at two published books and a third beginning to take shape.

The thread I didn’t plan

The Triquetra Chronicles has been in conversation with the celestial calendar from the beginning…not because I specifically planned it that way, but because the series, as it tends to do, knew things before I did.

The Harbinger circles around the Spring Equinox. That turning point, the moment when light overtakes dark, when things buried begin to surface, is woven into the heart of the first book. It was the original launch window I had intended before the manuscript needed more time. When I missed it, I waited for the next threshold.

The Summer Solstice.

I launched The Harbinger on the Summer Solstice. The longest day. The peak of the light. And then I wrote The Enigma, and the Summer Solstice found its way into the story itself, arriving as an insistence rather than a decision. I launched that book around the Summer Solstice too.

I noticed what was happening only after it had already happened.

…and now it is Mabon. The Autumn Equinox. The balance point before the descent into the darker half of the year. Book 3 is beginning and I can tell you, without revealing where it goes, that this particular celestial moment is likely to find its way into that story too.

The series keeps choosing its own calendar. I keep showing up and following.

What the balance point means

There is something worth sitting with in the specific energy of Mabon; the equal moment before the tipping.

Two books are in the world. A third is beginning. The series has found its reader, its community, its celestial thread; and here, at the balance point, everything feels equally weighted between what has been built, and what is still becoming.

That is not a comfortable place to live. But it is an honest one.

The harvest traditions associated with Mabon are about gratitude and assessment; taking stock of what the season produced before the ground goes quiet. What grew. What didn’t. What to carry forward and what to release before the descent.

I have been doing that inventory quietly this week.

Two books. A series identity that keeps clarifying itself. A reader who lights a candle and isn’t sure why, and is starting, slowly, to stop apologizing for it. Events in new cities. Rooms full of people who recognized something in the pages. A name that turns out to mean exactly what the work has always been about.

The ground is not dark yet. But it is turning.

…and somewhere in that turning, Book 3 is waiting - patient, insistent, already knowing things I haven’t figured out yet.

For the woman reading this

If Mabon means something to you…if the turning of the seasons is something you feel in your body before you see it in the trees…you already know what this series is.

If it doesn’t…if this is the first time you’ve encountered the word and something in you is quietly curious about it…that curiosity is the thread. Follow it.

The darker half of the year is coming. It is, in the old traditions, the time of going inward. Of the stories told by firelight. Of the things that surface when the noise of summer quiets and there is finally enough stillness to hear them.

There is no better time to begin a series about the things that refuse to stay buried.