When the night listens back.

At the threshold between worlds, where the light fades and wild things stir.

Fiery sparks reach up into the darkness. The forest barely visible beyond the glow of the fire and the shy beams of moonlight peeking between the evergreens. The sun has long slipped behind the hills, making way for the darkness to unfurl over the woods. It’s Samhain, All Hallows’ Eve, and the air feels charged, the veil thin. Harvest season is over, the fields bare, the forest exhales.

There’s an old belief that on this night, an invisible door creaks open. The boundary between worlds grows porous, and spirits, ancestors, and wandering things cross freely between them. In Ireland, some tales say the púca, a shape-shifter, rides through the countryside, claiming the last of the crops. In Scotland, will-o’-the-wisps are said to dance above the bogs or luring the curious from their paths. That always makes me think of my woodland walks where, more often than not, I end up straying from the trail and landing somewhere knee-deep in brambles. Maybe that's why these stories stay with me: I can never resist wandering off the path either. And then, somewhere in storm-tossed highlands, the Cailleach, the ancient crone of winter, awakens and begins her long reign.

Here, in my garden in the forest, these stories feel less like superstition and more like remembering. The night itself seems animate, nothing ever stays still here. I catch movement between the trees, perhaps a fox, perhaps an owl, or perhaps my own imagination playing tricks, and for a moment it’s easy to believe the forest is full of listeners.

The fire crackles, consuming branches gathered from the last storm. Sparks whirl upward like tiny souls, each one a brief flare of something that once was, wood, leaf, light, returning to the air. I think of the year burning away in the same way: sometimes slow and lingering, sometimes bright and brief, but always leaving only a thin trace of memories.

Maybe that’s the real meaning of Samhain: not to flee the darkness, but to acknowledge it. To sit beside it as one might sit beside an old friend whose stories you’re finally ready to hear. The creatures that stir when the light retreats are they not parts of us too? The doubts, the half-buried fears, or the griefs and beliefs we thought we’d outgrown. At this time of year, it feels like they’re rising now like mist, asking not for exile but for my attention. The projects I abandoned, or the frozen friendship I haven't had the courage to let go of.

Perhaps the fire doesn’t exist to banish the dark but to converse with it, and to cast enough light to see what’s asking to be known. I watch the coals pulse red and think of all the small flames we carry unseen to others: hope, kindness, curiosity, stubborn love. Even when it doesn’t feel like it, they survive every winter. They always have.

Soon I’ll let the fire die down to embers, and the night will reclaim my garden. The forest will go on whispering, as it always does. But for now, I sit with the warmth on my face and the chill at my back, perfectly balanced between worlds: one foot in light, one in shadow.

Whether we want it or not, those long nights are coming. They can be less fearsome if you remember that, somewhere in the dark, a flame still flickers. It's not gone, only changed.

🕯 See you where the wild things are,

Allie