Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s the best time of the year.  Ring a ling, ring a ling, ring a ling.  Yes, because the woods are lovely, dark and deep.  And because we have promises to keep.  It’s the best time of the year.

I’m no Christmas curmudgeon.  The lights and the cheeriness lift my spirits, too.  Yet it is not the lights toward which I drift, drawn in Frost’s New England sleigh pulled by a draft horse black as the snow falling is white.  I wander toward the woods, the dark and the deep.  In there, amongst the trees, far from city lights lies the reason for the season for me.

Each night for the last week or so I’ve heard my favorite sound of the season, the hooting of a great gray owl which lives in our woods.  I’ve never seen this bird and this may will be the child of the one I heard years ago.  The bass voice declares a confidence in the dark and the cold, an embrace.  The rhythm and the solitariness of the sound captures the winter dark as a loon’s cry distills the summer sun setting on a northern lake.

This is the carol for which my heart yearns; strange, in its way, since the great gray is the apex predator in our world, excepting, of course, the humans.

So, as you drink your Christmas cheer, crack the window a bit, listen. You might hear the voice of the woods, lovely, dark and deep.