Real luxury is simple. It’s born of absence. It’s the hot tea after trudging in the snow. Or the plunge in the cold river on a day in the nineties. As Patience Gray so beautifully lays out in Honey From A Weed, the cycle of human life in agriculture necessarily features times of fasting and feasting.

Snow came on Christmas Eve, like drawing in reverse: the white background came down and laced itself between the forms. It erased all extraneous lines and marks. The vineyard especially becomes its own abstract sheet music—a stave of trellis wire, the cursive and curlicues of the vines against white parchment. Little flecks of ink are really small birds and blackened seed heads of Queen Anne’s Lace.

As I began my circuit from behind the house and around toward the pond, a mist had risen turning the world milky. Tiny beads of moisture flew upward before the beam of my headlamp. But just then the moon resolved itself, bright white through the muddle. The air cleared, and there was the moon reflecting in the silky black water of the pond.

For instance, don’t assume flour is flour or a carrot is a carrot. The permutations of carrot are multitudinous. There’s variety — Jaune de Doub, Red Core Chantenay, Nante, Purple Dragon to name just a few. There are new summer carrots — skinny translucent orangesicles which taste more like their foliage, rather green. While winter carrots who’ve undergone hard frost and been dug out from under mulch and snow taste incredibly sweet, and deeply carroty. Then there’s the soil the carrot is grown in, how much water it received, how it was stored, etc. They can be eaten braised or roasted, shaved or chunked, raw or pickled…

Another principle of permaculture at work on our little afternoon of tree cutting was Stacking Functions. Much more than one thing was accomplished with a single expenditure of energy (both human and a couple cans of fossil fuel). Instead of just killing a tree and burning the debris, we created something useful to the soil in that spot; a water retention opportunity; a refuge for wildlife; a place to plant more trees and shrubs where they will benefit from the added nutrients and moisture; a way to use up what would be ‘waste’; and creating something rather beautiful.

This mid-Scorpio moment is one of the cross quarter points of the year. In the Celtic calendar these points reflect the beginning of a season. You can really notice them in the garden —or in your mood as the seasons change. This is Samhain — our understanding of Halloween is an overlay. A time to mark death. And then All Saint’s Day, to note the transcendence of suffering and death, a new beginning.

Similarly, leaf drop feels like loss; yet it is necessary for the new to emerge. That moment of letting go, the exhale of the leaf floating downward, irrevocably leaving its habitual place, remains heart-rending.

Snow came on Christmas Eve, like drawing in reverse: the white background came down and laced itself between the forms. It erased all extraneous lines and marks. The vineyard especially becomes its own abstract sheet music—a stave of trellis wire, the cursive and curlicues of the vines against white parchment.

Nature has this beautiful way of fuzzing the lines. Nothing is ever one hundred percent perfect, squared-off, complete. There’s always a little wiggle room so something else good can get in, so evolution can happen, or so the acorns get cleaned up, put to their rightful purpose, so that there is breathing room.

This space to fill a space is what feels needed right now. The summer is tumbling over, seed heads split and scatter, emptying out. The forces of new life are tipping over into the influence of spoilage yeast, mold — not yet death but the chaos of transformation.