How to Use This Book  11
These seasons are experienced on many levels. A season of birth does not just represent seeds sprouting and the babies being born, but also whatever is beginning. This might be a new relationship, the start of a project, moving to a new home, changing jobs, or turning over a new leaf and taking a fresh approach to life. Thus at a seasonal Festival celebrating birth there may be people who have a young child, are anticipating one, or are longing for one; people who have some other new aspect to celebrate in their lives, such as a new job, a new creative project, or a new meditation practice; people who are searching for new ideas, a new relationship, or a new direction, as well as those who just come along and are reminded of and prompted toward the new. Whether you wish to create and participate in rituals or not, the sections on the themes of each Festival will allow you to understand that Festival more deeply, and find the place where the Festivals resonate with your own life. The Wheel is cyclic and as endless as nature and so it teaches us of the most difficult-to-believe truth: life changes. If you are stuck in a long, drawn-out personal winter, reading the Winter Solstice section and then moving onto the next section may prompt your gradual turning point and emergence. If you wish you could go more deeply into your spiritual understandings, your magical practice, your self-development, or your emotional depths, try reading through the themes, memoirs, and rituals attached to the inward turn: those from Lammas through to Samhain, the darkening time of the year. The Eight Festivals are often linked with agricultural activities such as planting and harvest, but they stand independent of these events. The four Quarter Festivals (the two equinoxes and two solstices) are astronomical events; they mark points of the earth’s relationship to the sun. The solstices are the days of greatest light (Summer Solstice) and greatest dark (Winter Solstice), when the tilt of the earth has resulted in the longest or shortest possible hours of the sun reaching the earth. The two equinoxes (Spring Equinox and Autumn Equinox), occurring halfway between the solstices, have nights and days of equal length. The four remaining Festivals are known as