Find yourself near water if possible—a stream, pond, or even a bowl of collected rainwater. If indoors, place your hands in cool water or hold a smooth river stone. Sit with your spine long but not rigid, feet bare against earth or floor. The air around you should be cool enough to feel on your skin. Light a single candle or sit in the thin, graying light of this October afternoon. Let your breath find its own rhythm before you begin.

Gach buidheachas don Mhàthair Talmhainn, a tha ga ar cumail beò.
(All gratitude to the Mother Earth, who keeps us alive.)

It is the seventh of October—mid-autumn, when the wheel turns toward darkness and the land begins its long exhale. The trees are shedding their brilliance, leaving behind skeletal honesty. The earth is damp with rain and rot, fertile with endings. You are here, in this thinning season, bearing two companions within your heart: bewilderment and reverent feeling.

You do not understand all that moves within you, yet something holy stirs nonetheless.

“The land does not ask you to know—only to kneel.”

Close your eyes. Feel the ground beneath you as it tilts toward winter. Feel the bewilderment as a fog settling in your chest, obscuring clear paths. Feel the reverence as a warmth in your throat, an almost-prayer you cannot yet name.

Coisich gu sàmhach tro choille do chridhe.
(Walk quietly through the forest of your heart.)

Imagine yourself standing at the edge of a forest in October twilight. The birches are pale as bone, their leaves a scattering of gold coins on dark soil. The air smells of wet bark and fungus—that ancient, generative decay. You are bewildered here. The path ahead is unclear. Mist clings to the low places, obscuring your next step.

But you walk anyway.

With each step, you feel the earth—soft, yielding, cold—receiving your weight without judgment. She does not demand clarity. She does not require you to have answers. The Mother Earth holds bewilderment as easily as she holds certainty; both are seeds in her infinite soil.

Notice how the trees stand, still and sure, even as they release everything they’ve held all summer. Their leaves fall in perfect surrender—not confusion, but completion. What in you is falling? What are you releasing into the mist, into the mulch of this moment?

Tha an talamh a’ gabhail ris na h-uile rud.
(The earth accepts all things.)

Now, as you walk deeper, you feel something else rise—reverence. Not for something distant or divine in the way of untouchable gods, but for this: the way moss glows even in shadow, the architecture of a spider’s web strung between thorns, the patience of roots breaking stone over centuries. You are bewildered and yet bowing. You do not understand, and yet you worship.

This is the paradox held in the palm of October: confusion and sacredness, walking hand in hand.

The bewilderment you carry is not failure—it is the forest itself, refusing to be mapped. The reverence you feel is your animal body remembering it belongs here, among the leaf-fall and the fungal bloom, among all things that live and rot and feed the next becoming.

Leig leis a’ mhàthair do chnàmhan a shlànachadh.
(Let the mother heal your bones.)

Kneel now, in your mind’s forest. Place your palms flat against the cold earth. Feel her beneath your hands—dense, cool, humming with the slow work of decomposition and renewal. She is not warm, not comforting in the way of sunlight. She is the comfort of composting, of things breaking down to become rich and fertile.

Speak to her your bewilderment. Let it pour from you like water from cupped hands: I do not know. I cannot see. I am lost in the fog of my own becoming. Let the earth drink it. She has swallowed mountains and epochs; she can hold your confusion without flinching.

Now feel her response—not in words, but in sensation. A coolness spreading up your arms. A weight lifting from your shoulders as if roots were gently pulling downward, drawing away what is too heavy for you to carry alone. The Mother does not solve your bewilderment; she composts it, transforms it into something that can feed what comes next.

And the reverence? She mirrors it back to you. You are as holy as the mushroom breaking through bark. You are as necessary as rot. Your confusion is not exile from the sacred—it is the sacred, the way the forest is most alive in its decomposing.

Tha thu nad phàirt den chruth-atharrachadh.
(You are part of the transformation.)

Breathe here. Let her heal you not by removing the bewilderment, but by showing you it is woven into the same fabric as your reverence—both necessary, both true, both held in the palm of the season’s turning.

Take a moment to contemplate:

What is bewildering you that might be the very threshold of your deepest reverence—and what would it mean to stop trying to resolve it, and instead to stand within it as you would stand in an October forest, uncertain of the path but certain of your belonging?

Beannachdan na Màthar Talmhainn ort, a ghaoil.
(Blessings of the Mother Earth upon you, beloved.)

You are released from this working, but not from the forest. The bewilderment remains, and so does the reverence. Walk forward into the thinning light of October, carrying both, belonging to both, held by the one who holds all seasons in her patient, decomposing hands.

Coisich ann an sìth. Coisich ann an geamhradh. Coisich ann an gaol.
(Walk in peace. Walk in winter. Walk in love.)

The Mother watches. The Mother holds. The Mother transforms.