Witchful Thinking: The “Wheel,” Change, and the Climate Crisis

I’ve been doing this blog for more than a year and a day now, and in pagan circles, that means something. It means that I’ve gone completely through one cycle of seasons, one full turn of “The Wheel.”

So what is this “Wheel” anyway?

The Wheel of the Year in pagan parlance is how we describe our holidays, also called Sabbats. There are eight of them, each about six weeks apart: Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Midsummer, Lughnassah (sometimes called Lammas), and Mabon. Around and around they go, cycling one after the other, each marking a particular time of the year, a change that is both seasonal and spiritual. As I have said before, the Wheel’s most critical feature is that it turns.

The Wheel marks the seasons, marks points in the life cycle of the Earth, and the cycle of the harvest. It marks when seeds are planted, how they are tended, what they ripen into, how they are harvested, and what happens as the land lies fallow. But the purpose of that cycle isn’t to merely trace the continuing cycle of death and rebirth. While the Wheel does in fact turn, cycling through the same holidays each year, this turning is not entirely repetitive. The Wheel is meant to be a spiral, and with each consecutive turn, we’re supposed to use the repeating cycle of seasons to grow in away that…