So the snows have come, with the oats yet to harvest.  A month still before Samhain, but the Wheel seems to be turning early.  My forearms are covered with tiny scratches from the straw, as I pound the oat sheaves into the darkness of their threshing casket.  I had hoped for another few weeks of mellow fall weather before the winter sets in, but often the actual seasons of life don't match the liturgical calendar of feasts and fasts, worship and work, as the moons wax and wane.  

That's ok.  It used to bother me a bit, but after a half-decade now of living off grid on our old-fashioned farm, I have come to enjoy the reflections which are born in the tension between the symbolic and the real.  What does it mean that the snowflakes are falling in Lammas-tide?  Is it a sign that I've taken my ease for too long, putting off until tomorrow what should have been done yesterday?  Is it a gentle reminder that the sabbath eschaton of the dark-half of the year is often prefigured, even pre-echoed, in the waning of the light-half?  That the root-tip of the yin is buried within the full-flower of the yang?  As I harvest our years' worth of oatmeal, sown in the spring with yesteryear's corn-queen, these and many more oracular hints occur to me.

But at the end of the day, the weather is a goddess all her own.  What I make of her comings and goings is up to me, but her reality extends above and beyond my small sphere of concern.  And if this is so with the spirit of the seasons, how much moreso with the Creator of us all?  

In the end, only Providence endures...