Recent reports have warned of the impossibility of protecting the British coastline from an encroaching sea. “We cannot win the war on water”, one scientist said.

The photograph yesterday of a black hole in a far distant galaxy was headline news all over the world, eclipsing even Brexit in its importance.

Where and as I write now, green woodpeckers are yaffling in the oak trees around me as kites, ravens and buzzards circle around my home looking for breakfast to feed mates building their nests or even sitting on their eggs. It is a calm damp morning, the prelude to a timeless spring day in this old and sacred Upper Wye valley in Wales.

The Full Moon on Monday will not only be when she is at her closest to Earth, but as she disappears behind our planetary home she will glow fiery red.

As one year turned into another, a wild heather in my garden came into bloom, beautifully and in celebration of new beginnings. I wondered then what it thinks and what it knows, in its wisdom, of what is to come?

Friday’s Solstice brings to an end a long cycle of intense learning in which you were asked to remember and execute a pledge made before time began.

In Christian churches all over the world, the ancient celebrations known as Advent are beginning, in preparation for and in memory of the coming of Jesus into the world at Christmas.

Whatever the cause, climate change is being proven scientifically to be far more serious than has been believed before. Reports this week say we have 12 years only to save the Planet from catastrophic events resulting from human action, unless there is a revolution in how we live, now.

Sunday’s Equinox is remarkable for marking the three quarter point of an eventful year, for bridging two extraordinary seasons and, shamanically, for being betwixt and between two different worlds.

There is growing talk about the commercialisation of the cosmos. Scientists speak seriously about occupied houses on the moon in the foreseeable future, about the mining of precious resources in the solar system, about the imminence of space tourism and even about space wars as nations begin to fight over possession of space territory.