Let me tell you of a kind of silence that happens right before I light a candle. My breath held- I scan. Is this mine to use? Did I read enough? Did I cite the right elder, credit the right lineage, did I do this right? Do I feel “right”? For most witches, that scan takes a second, maybe two, and then the hand moves to the match. For me, in some seasons, the scan never ends. It just kept circling, tighter and tighter, until the candle sat unlit on the altar for days while I read one more article, watched one more interview, hunted for one more thread of proof that I was enough and I did enough. Searching for the unobtainable feeling of “rightness.”

Every fallen leaf says the same thing, and every year I have to learn it again: death is not an ending. It is a turning.

We are living inside the death of the climate that cradled us — the steady seasons our ancestors planted by, prayed by, told time by. That is a hard sentence to write and a harder one to live with. But Nature has been teaching this lesson since long before we had words for it, and they are teaching it still, to anyone willing to walk out the door and pay attention.

Kneel beside any fallen log and you will find the whole curriculum. Fungi lacing through softened wood. Saplings rooted in the body of a nurse log, drinking from what came before. The sweet rot of leaf litter turning into the soil that will feed next spring. Nowhere in the forest is death treated as failure. This is the mechanism of renewal — the way an ecosystem makes room for what has not yet imagined. Even fire, devastating as it is, wakes seeds that cannot open without heat. The Land does not resist their own dying. And the longer I sit with that, the more I suspect our resistance to death causes us more suffering than the transformation itself.

Often have I felt the pull to not let something go — items I have loved a long while. I come from a line of collectors, tinkerers, antique dealers, peddlers, refurbishers, DIYers, rebuilders, and — dare I say — hoarders. Growing up with little new things on hand, it is hard to toss something out when you hear “I might need that someday,” or “someone I know might need that someday.” My folks’ house is a dusty museum of curiosities: three sets of crutches, an old yellow leather wheelchair, a variety of rims — some rusted, some chrome — parts for cars fifty years old and older, farm equipment from way, way back, a vintage cast iron and enamel stove, a velvet lavender fainting couch, and a big yellow wood box holding twine and a length of rope so large it looks like it came off a ship, tangled in among so many other tiny things.