In some calendars and ways of being, this is a cardinal point of the year, a turning-point and more than a point, a period of time when other worlds are more perceptible than usual. (“Usual” may, as usual, vary from user to user.) It’s a time of contact, respectful contact; of remembrance and remembrancing; of embracing kith and kin and offering hospitality to long-lost and distant relations, to strangers, and to those of other worlds; but a time of wary healthy respect: be aware of their otherness and beware of arrogant over-familiarity, casual closeness, and the danger of consumption.

So, a time to write again. To return to writing, and maybe to write in other ways. Writing in other forms and places. Not in the #AcWriMo and #NaNoWriMo sense, I tried that before and it didn’t work because work intervened; that’s inescapable but the extra weight and angst and self-mortification was excrutiating and I’m not going through that again. It was horrible, the pressures of time constraint and the peer pressure of people writing on strict schedules, sometimes competitively, and #successfully #achieving writing #goals every day.

There’s enough horror at this time of year, and more generally, without deliberately and unnecessarily adding to it.

(Also, I have marking to do. So writing is already destined to be short and occasional.)

So. Writing starts again, gently, with a resurrection of The Dendromorphoses. There are few words as it’s a moment, today and tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow night, for those who walk the woods to walk and talk in their own way. This is their time.

It’s Hallowe’en.

It’s dark outside now.

Close your windows and doors, draw the curtains and cover your mirrors and any reflective surfaces, stay well lit. Be careful around the fireplace, but do send amusing punful thoughts in its direction and read and tell stories of the dead and of other worlds, times, and places. Tell stories at that hearth, while making and eating appropriate seasonal richly fragrant delights, and offering them—all the delights, the tellings too—to absent friends and other others.

It’s dark outside. They’re walking in the dark. It is theirs. They walk the dark. But we walk the gloaming together.