Samhain to Solstice

On the Art of Ending

✦ Hearth Fire Talks · Essay 1 ✦

1. The Unending Year

The year no longer ends.

The lights never die. The supermarkets hum like industrial hives at 3 a.m., their fridges glowing like small suns that never burn out. We live a never ending afternoon, engineered by corporations who want you to forget that dusk exists.

Everything is curated for joy — the colour coordinated candles, the tables, the seven-layer desserts.

But here is the truth nobody wants to say:

You cannot keep squeezing the soul for juice. Eventually it runs dry.

Not in an elegant poetic way.

In a landfill way:

souls flattened like plastic bottles under the weight of an unending “productive” year. Mulch for a system that has no use for our humanity.

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2. The Rhythms of Dark

Imagine: a the end of day when the sun slips down, and your whole body wants to collapse into the soft animal of night. A quiet exhale. A small reckoning. The honest aftertaste of the day.

But something — something bright and coercive — drags you back into the glare.

The blue lights stay on.
The streets pulse.
The inbox hisses.
You’re always “reachable,” as if that were a virtue.

It’s not a feast, it’s a rave without an exit door. The modern rhythm demands you keep dancing long after your inner music stops. 

Your body holds up.
Your soul doesn’t.
It retreats. softly, leaving tiny messages for you to decipher: exhaustion, meaninglessness, numb scrolling, sudden crying fits, autoimmune storms.

Signals of a rhythm violated.

Now, in the evening of the year, instead of winter rest, you’re handed:

– tax deadlines
– family expectations
– compulsory cheer
– “fun” obligations
– year-end performance reviews
– a social calendar stacked like a funeral pyre

You want to dim your lights and reminisce but your are told to sparkle.

Humans need nights. We need winter. We need dark, and silence, and the dignity of not being entertaining.

Without it, we wither.

Not dramatic grief — no, something quieter, more devastating:
Our soul roots dry out.
Unrooted, how could anything begin again?

(Side note: Samhain once marked the new year. The time of winter, when ancestors came to share their darkness and sit at our fires, was holy. When the Gregorian reform replaced the old calendar, it didn’t just shift dates — it replaced a cosmology where in the middle of night a foreign the sun god glared away Mother Night.

3. Death, Endings, and the Refusal to Close

We have not only lost evenings and winter. All rest is shameful now.
Ending is framed as failure.
We talk about “staying young” like it was a beautiful thing.

If you dare to slow down, the world treats you like a malfunction — a defective gadget, no longer economically relevant. We are encouraged to fake vitality, fake productivity, fake youth. The infantilisation of a species terrified of its own mortality.

Our grandmothers knew endings. They wore black in mourning and sang lullabies at graves.
They sat with winter’s silence, in the dark ,while their eyesight slowly faded. They cleaned out their houses and took in the washing so no wandering souls would be caught.

They watched the fire burn down to ash and read the message of the dying embers.

No “healing journey.” Just women who knew how to midwife the dark.

4. The Lost Feasts of the Dying Light

This whole series was harvested on Samhain — a night when women of Inanna sat in the dark to read stories and listen to the silence.

Wondering:
What are we doing here? And how will we find the lost paths our ancestor once walked?

Of this we felt sure: Samhain (All Saint’s Eve), Yule (Solstice), Imbolc (Candlemass) must have been one long ritual of rest and reawakening.

We were not looking for the Celtic or Pagan Revival fantasies. We were looking for directions in a new kind of darkness that was as real to us as the fairies and northern gods were to our grandmothers.

We talked about our foremothers who came from many different regions and corners of the world. We gathered our memories of little rituals they still secretly practiced, often with an embarrassed smile.

The record is broken, erased, colonised, overwritten. Historians barely agree on anything.

But across Indo-European lands, a pattern flashes like a signal fire: when the harvest is done and the lights go out and great cold comes over the people . these are dangerous times. Times to remember strength and endurance. Times to be in community

Shared food. Apples, bones, pork, fish, chestnuts.
Shared fear.
Shared courage.

Gathering around fires and opening the inner vision because knowing the future helped them to gain trust everything would be well.
They guarded against the spirits of dark and fed the ancestors to pray for a new year of fertility and plenty and help to negotiate with the dark.

We imagined the things our ancestors did and the stories they told. But how could we translate it all into NOW.
We were sniffing the soil for lost instructions, scribbled maps to make sense of the dark.
In the end, the only knowledge is written in our bones. Guided by felt memories we must cross the dark in our own ways.

Sit in the dark.

Just sit.
With a candle.
With a biscuit.
With someone you trust — or alone, if that’s what you’ve got.

Wait.

The demons will come.

Not the theatrical ones.
No Asmodeus or evil fairy king.
No long teethed monsters. 

Instead, there will be the fears that have been around all year long.
But now, in the darkness there is no way to avoid them.

– The image on the news we can’t unsee
– The memories of humiliation and cowardice
– The sudden fear to never make it
– Childhood wounds
– Our collective loss of innocence
– The need to make sense of it all
– The grief about a world dying

Your demons may be different from ours. Once yours appear, you’ll know.
You will feel a cold that no fire can ever chase away.

Don’t flinch.
Don’t scroll.
Don’t turn on the light.
Just sit.

If you can look your real fears in the eye, without running, without putting up a fight, they will become your dark companions. They will make you strong.

Repeat as needed.
The winter is only beginning and facing fears has always been the work of winter.

5. After Samhain: The Pause of Winter

When you finally come back in from the dark, something fundamental rearranges itself.

The fog no longer threatens.
January stops feeling like a punishment.

You discover inner riches — the kind our ancestors built entire worldviews around.

ICall on your ancestors - living or dead.
Pour the drinks thes once enjoed: tea sticky with sugar, mulled wine, cloudy cider.
Give simple gifts.

Feed the birds who sung for you in summer.

Keep a candle burning. Stare into the fire.
But do not burn yourself up in consumer joy.

Tend to the needs of the night because dark is where soul-roots drink.

Winter is not the forever end.
Winter is the womb of it all.

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6. The Art of Ending and Beginning

Samhain once marked the new year. Not through fireworks but through awe and community and trembling recognition:

Everything ends.
Everything begins.
Everything returns.

Wisdom is found not in cheerfulness, but in collapse and decay—the soft yielding into the darkness that composts the dead year.

The Dao De Jing tells of the Dark valley of Yin: the feminine abyss where all things dissolve when the cosmic projector shuts down.

Not decay.
Not despair.
Just the black soil of the world.
Compost. Fertile.

Feed your roots in darkness.
Spring will come.
It always does.
But only for those who winter properly.

**HEARTH FIRE TALKS**  

Conversations for the long nights of a disenchanted winter.  Five essays on meeting the dark, letting go, and rising again.

For those who want to follow the deeper threads, the dialogue continues — slowly, quietly — in **Inanna Notes** (in German), where these winter questions take root at the hearth.