Edges of the Year

Samhain notes on quiet, wintering, and the thin veil

I’ve been moving fast for months. Bangladesh at the end of February, then straight to India, then Borneo with a day across the border into Brunei—finally landing home at the end of March with three countries still jostling in my body. London in late April. Lisbon and London again in May. A residential writing workshop in June.

Then July and August: the fruit farm at full tilt, the farm shop, guests in the self-catering accommodation, the season’s relentless admin. No travel, but no rest either—just a different kind of velocity, rooted in one place but moving just as fast.

September brought two photo retreats back to back, leading groups while still catching my breath from summer. And October—almost the entire month—Pakistan and Afghanistan, the light there so golden it still glowed behind my eyes when I finally landed back in Scotland. An exhibition to co-curate at our local theatre, four other exhibitions needing work, trip logistics for next year laid out in spreadsheets for the small photo tour business I’m building with Neale James, The Journey Beyond, all while the family business kept demanding attention even as I moved through airports half a world away.

I chose it, mostly. But in those last couple of days of October, as I tried to settle back into home life, an avalanche of paperwork greeting me, I could feel the year’s weight in my body—in the way I moved without my usual bounce, my mind slow. The light was slipping earlier each day, breath turning visible.

I felt it coming like weather. The need to stop. To let the year arrive in me instead of rushing past it.

Samhain marks the boundary between seasons—the hinge when the bright, outward half of the year closes and the darker half begins. In the old Gaelic reckoning, it begins at nightfall on October 31st. The last of the harvest; the first of the deep quiet. In Scottish lore, the Cailleach—Queen of Winter—takes up her staff around now and hardens the ground. She strikes the earth and the frost comes; she breathes and the rivers slow. I don’t picture her as menace but as a stern friend who insists on what you won’t choose for yourself.

Stop pushing. Let the land go quiet. Do your inside work.

I had intentions for Samhain. A fire, a candle or two, some gesture to mark the threshold deliberately. But All Hallow’s Eve found me sick and so tired I could barely think straight. The ritual happened in my head instead: yes, the darker half begins; I can stop now. Or perhaps stop. The permission felt provisional, hard-won.

What surprised me was the relief. As if my body understood before my mind did. The accelerator could ease now—not completely, but enough. Enough to stop pushing. Enough to let the year’s weight settle rather than carrying it at speed.

The veil thinned whether I lit the candle or not. Winter began while I was lying down. Maybe that’s the most honest crossing of all.

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This year I needed the Cailleach’s insistence. I wasn’t going to stop on my own—there are always more emails, more logistics, more images to sort. But exhaustion and illness arrived like emissaries, carrying her message: the season has turned whether you’re ready or not. The ground hardens. The work changes.

The Cailleach doesn’t ask if it’s convenient. She just closes the door on one season and opens another. I’m learning to be grateful for that ruthlessness.

My “inside work” this winter: slow editing, catching up with my travel journal, writing what travel has shaken loose. Sitting with images until I can see what I was actually looking at—not just what I thought I was capturing in the moment. Letting the year’s fragments settle and show me their shape.

Editing can be a kind of prayer: keep, let go, keep, let go.

I haven’t started yet—not properly. The laptop sits by the window, folders from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan waiting. Faces I met weeks and months ago, light I stood in and then left. At speed, I couldn’t see what I’d gathered. Now, in the slower rhythm that winter asks for, I’m hoping the images will start to speak. What surfaces will surprise me, I’m sure—frames I’ve forgotten, gestures half-caught that hold something I didn’t know I was seeing. Patterns only visible now that I’ve stopped moving.

This is what the darker half offers: time to see what the bright half collected. Time to ask not just is this a good photograph? but what was I actually looking at? What changed in me when I stood there?

The work will be slower than I’m used to. My hands will want to rush—flag, rate, export, move on. But winter asks for something different. Attention without urgency. The willingness to sit with an image until it tells me whether it stays or goes.

I’m learning to trust that this slowness isn’t idleness. It’s how the year arrives in me. How travel stops being a list of places and becomes something I can actually hold.

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Samhain carries the sense that the border between worlds is thinner. I feel it most when I finally light the candle I was too tired to manage on October 31st—not immediately, but in these days that follow. I set a quiet corner by the hearth: a candle, a chair, my thoughts. Not elaborate, just deliberate. A space to let the year’s ghosts arrive: the selves I was in each place, the boundaries that twisted and softened when I met other lives, the version of me that boarded the first plane in February and the one that stumbled off the last flight in October.

I don’t always know what I’m remembering or honouring. Sometimes it’s a place. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes just the strange, dislocating grace of being far from home and briefly, utterly awake.

The veil thins and I sit with my notebook, letting whatever arrives, arrive. Names surface. Images. Half-formed thoughts about what it means to witness, to be witnessed, to carry other people’s lives in your camera and your body. I don’t force it into sense. I just write it down and let the candle burn.

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So here I am, inside the darker half. The fire lit most evenings now, a candle or two on the desk. The laptop waiting. Outside, the light fails earlier each day and the wind strips the last leaves from the trees. The year is closing down, mulching itself, going quiet.

I don’t have a grand plan for winter. No clear sense of what will emerge from these weeks of sitting still. Part of me wants to know—wants to see the shape of a project, a narrative, something I can point to and say this is what the year was for. But I’m trying to resist that urgency. Trying to trust that distillation takes time, that patterns reveal themselves only when you stop looking so hard.

What I’m hoping for is simpler than a plan: to let the year settle in me until I understand what it taught. To see which images still hold weight and which were just beautiful light I happened to stand in. To write my way toward clarity, or at least toward better questions. To stop long enough that when spring comes and the Cailleach lays down her staff, I’ll know what I’m carrying forward and what I can leave behind.

For now, this is enough: the fire’s warmth, the sound of weather outside, the slow work ahead of seeing what I’ve gathered. The threshold crossed. The darker half begun. Permission, finally, to rest in the edges of the year.