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Approaching Samhain, Winter, and the North 2025

 

It’s been nearly a year since I wrote my last blog, but that’s because it’s been a year of huge change and upheaval as we prepared to relocate from Somerset back to North Yorkshire, the place of my childhood. This will be shorter than usual as we are still in the process of moving and waiting for completion.

 

As Samhain draws near, I feel the familiar weight of the year turning. The light retracts, the earth exhales, and the world begins its long descent into stillness. For many, this season is simply a prelude to Christmas; a time of dark evenings and fallen leaves. But for me, as someone who lives by the medicine of the Four Directions, Samhain marks a passage - the threshold into the North.

 

In the Irish wheel cosmology I work with, the North is the realm of winter, of death and rebirth, of inner reckoning and raw truth. It is the place of battle, not the outward clash of armies, but the inward confrontation with our own shadows, fears, griefs, and unhealed parts that wait patiently for the quiet to surface. The North does not tolerate our pretences, rather, it strips us bare, demanding honesty; and though its medicine can be harsh, it is also profoundly cleansing.

 

This year, that northern call has manifested not only spiritually, but physically. My relocation to North Yorkshire has felt like a pilgrimage into the North itself; a journey into both landscape and psyche. The land here is wilder, older, more unyielding. It has a kind of austere beauty in winter that reminds me daily that belonging is earned through relationship, not assumed through arrival. The move isn’t easy. There have been many challenges, delays, and those intense moments of doubt where I’ve wondered whether the spirits were testing my resolve or simply redirecting me elsewhere. Yet, even in the frustration, I sense the purpose. The North often teaches through resistance. It hardens us, yes, but only so that we might endure what must come next. In its way, it is a forge that strips, tempers, and reshapes us into something truer.

 

As Samhain and the dark half of the year approaches, I can feel that same forging energy working through my life. The ‘thinning of the veil’ is more than a poetic notion; for me, it is a felt reality and an invitation to listen deeper, to honour the ancestors, and to face what has died within and around us over the past year. This is the time to lay old versions of ourselves to rest, to compost the remnants of what no longer serves, and to make ready the fertile dark where new life will one day take root.

 

There’s also a strange relief in entering this season. The world’s small talk and surface busyness feel intolerable to me at this time of year, literally physically draining. My body craves quiet, depth, and meaning. The North demands that kind of honesty; it will not suffer the shallow or performative. It insists that we slow down, retreat inward, and let silence do its work. I suppose that’s what our relocation and my own turning toward winter are really about: alignment. My life, my land, and my inner cycle are all shifting into the same direction — Northward. There’s a deep comfort in that coherence, even amid the stress and hardship. The road here has been long, but I can feel the rightness of it. The synchronicities of the process have left me in no doubt that the spirits of this place are waiting, patient as stone, for me to arrive.

 

So, as Samhain approaches and the mists begin to gather, I welcome the North in, with all its chill and challenge, its wisdom and renewal. I enter this season not as something to survive, but as a teacher to walk beside. For in the North, every death holds the seed of a new beginning.