The air has a cooler feel to it now, the clouds bigger and more threatening, most of the flowers have gone and its getting a bit chilly at night. Yep, autumn is approaching and we must bid farewell to the summer and prepare ourselves for the colder and darker half of the year. The autumnal equinox is the point in time when night and day are poised in balance, neither is in the ascendance.

Our ancestors saw special significance in points in time that were neither wholly one thing or the other, in this case the day of the equinox is not part of the dark half or the light half of the year. These fleeting moments that sit outside the normal definitions of ordering our environment are imbued with a power that comes from defying man's rules by escaping categorising. In defying being pigeon holed this time belongs to the powers of chaos and disorder, and folk tradition believed mischievous spirits of chaos were abroad at this time. The equinox and others of the seasonal festivals like Beltane and Samhain mark crossover points in the yearly cycle. They link two periods and are harbingers of change.

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