Finding the rhythm in the still point of Equinox

in a spinning, spiralling world

Avebury, September 2025

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest in Finistère. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are available for all and you are so welcome here. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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We are two-thirds through a month of travelling, visits and literary events. We began with a couple of days near Avebury to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary. It was a place I used to visit frequently when I lived in Bristol and even more when I later lived in Swindon. A place that provided equilibrium when I worked in a parish where several of the congregation left in protest at having a a woman minister. And several of those who remained would not accept the chalice from my hands. Women, they feared, were tainted. In At the heart's farthest edge, my memory-book, to be published in 2026, I remember it like this:

I'm not sure I was as 'serene' as my school-friends thought. But I was good at listening and did not divulge their confidences to others. And, when the whole class had any issue to raise with a teacher, I was the one who would speak truth to power, calmly. But most of all, what looked like serenity was the ability to go into an inner world where I could find equilibrium.

We've had wonderful readings this month. Sadly, we had to cancel the London event at Canada Water due to tube strikes, but had a superb evening in the Kemptown Bookshop in Brighton, listening to perspective-shifting poetry. We visited Cambridge for the next event. Illness and a tree on a train line meant we had two of the four poets bringing their distinctive lens to the world, but it was a wonderful evening. It was also a chance to catch up with a dear friend and the delight of returning to the place where I lived for three years of university and had not visited since before the pandemic.

The most recent event was in Bangor, at the excellent Kyffin Café where we often had launches when we lived in North Wales. It was an evening of poetry and music, old friends and familiarity, as well as new friends, but it took place without me. After three weeks of strong antibiotics for Lyme tick bites (just before leaving the forest) and nineteen days of trains and venue changes, visting family between events, exhaustion, lupus and a virus caught up with me. Adam hosted the event and it was excellent, but it was sad to miss it.

Today, we should be with our dearest friends in mid-Wales, sharing the Equinox, but I can’t take shivers and sickness to their home so we’ve stayed on in a friend’s beautiful cottage in North Wales while I recover, and hope to get to the events in Aberystwyth and Hay on Wye.

Equinox. A moment of equilibrium in a world that so needs it. Two-thirds through the trip and the year three-quarters through its cycle. A pause point. A space between breaths.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1975).

The Letters of Virginia Woolf: 1923-1928

As in writing, so in life.

So often we think of this moment of Equinox as 'balance' and so often in our lives we strive for this. Work/life; home/community; sleep/wake... But I've always struggled with the idea of balance. For me it’s a metaphor of plates spinning on sticks, the performer running between the poles to keep them spinning so that none slow down and fall. It feels frenetic, with the momentum of having a tiger by the tail. No pause. Breath ragged. Doing it all and keeping everything balanced.

Balance accords everything equal weight at all times. But what if instead we look to rhythm and cycles? What it we aspire to moments of harmony in which one aspect of life might be foregrounded more than another, but together they are melodious? What if the rhythm includes moments of equinox, pauses, rest, listening and kindness, holding and being held? The momentary still point at the centre of all the spinning plates in this wildly spiralling world.

A moment that takes me back to our first Autumn Equinox (Alban Elfed in the Druid tradition) in the forest:

September 21-25

First apples gathered.
Night-owl calls the harvest moon
to dazzle the stars.

from at world's end, begin

This month has been exhausting and exhilarating. I worried that my auto-immune condition would flare in the process of moving from place to place and so much busyness and it did. But despite difficult, unbalanced moments, herbs of breath and calm have travelled with me and there have been days of pause, human kindnesses, oases of finding a rhythm.

I hope this Equinox you have time to pause, to find your own rhythm to carry you into winter.

If you’d like to join me (virtually) in a cottage on the Atlantic Cornish coast, full of rhythms of sea and land at the next dark moon, on Saturday 27 September to write Calmly by Candlelight, with inspiration and time to create, upgrade your subscription today with 50% off an annual plan for as long as you subscribe.