Seasons are cycles, and like cycles they apply constantly in all situations.

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.

You have your world and I have mine. I see your world, but do I see it through my eyes or yours? You look at my world, but how much of what you observe is based on truth?

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.

Saturday’s full moon is the last one before the December Solstice and the penultimate full moon of this extraordinary year of 2018. Through the sun it is influenced by Sagittarius, the Archer, and it is special.

Mass death is a tragedy and always significant: mass death or any death as a result of war can never be excused, whatever justification is made usually by those who directly or indirectly gave the orders. Yesterday’s global remembering of the “Great” War at its significant anniversary was a sombre reflection of the waste of war, its cruelty and its folly, and of the duty of care of leaders.

On a sad, rainy day, Remembrance Day and Armistice Day merged together to enable those who choose to reflect upon and remember the lives lost in war: to think about the nature of war and why it occurs, and to think about the nature and reason for death itself. The dignity shown and prominence given to the commemorative events for the one hundredth anniversary planned for years before proves there were many who honour and remember still those who died in the first World War, and all wars, and those they loved and knew who have left too.

How or why we die does not matter, it is the fact of its occurrence that does. Young men destined to die on a battlefield have died in wildfires or earthquakes, just as some of those who died on the Somme would have ended their lives early anyway. A wave of mass deaths whether in the Twin Towers, a 1916 battlefield or in a tsunami is significant as a human tragedy, certainly, and as a lesson, too, to those who remain, teaching perhaps about the folly of conflict, the importance of honouring life while it is there, and of the pre-eminence of nature. For the individual, the death is the gift of freedom and the certainty of new life – it is the start of a new journey. Every death teaches us something, if we choose to look.

Meanwhile, it is right to mourn and remember those who are gone, perhaps whom we loved, and those who died so long ago in war, to remember those who have left quietly, father, husband, child, wife or pet, but who are much missed: for each of them, the act of love will be balm to the soul, as it is to those who live on, for now.

The tiny Welsh village where I live, enclosed by a great river and ancient mountains, values peace and the steady rhythm of nature and timeless tradition. There are no fireworks nor burnings of effigies on this or any other Bonfire Night, but the smell of woodsmoke hangs in the frosty air as a reminder of fire celebrations all over the world, and of the imminence of winter.

As I walk the woods and lanes of a forgotten land, often alone and seeing no-one, I am surrounded by the ghosts of monks who walked here once upon a time on holy pilgrimage, by the farmers and labourers who toiled to make a hard living on rocky soil and steep mountains, by the women and children who harvested the wood of ash and alder and oak to make clogs and keep warm, and by the many creatures that have lived and died here over thousands of years. Despite the multitude of memory around me, it is spacious, and peaceful.

When I think of the approaching of a Full Moon in October, the Hunter’s Moon, I am filled with the memory of running and hiding, running and hiding all alone in fear of giant black-caped horsemen on great black horses pursuing me through the darkest nights and moonlit nights, searching everywhere to find and kill me. The horsemen were hunters wreaking vengeance, and still, somewhere, they ride and seek with stony hearts.

The fires that have raged over Brett Kavanaugh and his suitability to be a Supreme Court judge have subsided since his confirmation on Saturday, but the embers smoulder, ready to reignite over his name, another name or over nothing. A wildfire is burning over swathes of the United States, and it threatens to be fiercer still in time to come.