The Magic of October

I finally made it back to the water this week and I was struck, almost immediately, at how much the texture of the forest and the coastline itself has changed, even since September. Most of the sea glass I found was unfinished. There weren't many shells to gather either and, distressingly, part of the pathway to my sacred spot was covered in dead fish - Pogies, from the looks of it.

I arrived at flow tide on the day of the full moon, about two hours after the peak of low tide. Because it was a full moon, the water was still very far out from shore, and the salt marshes I walk through to get to my spot looked to be no more than a puddle after a heavy rain. When I reached my space and took my usual seat, I was taken immediately by an overwhelming silence, suddenly broken by the screeching of a murder of crows. After they resolved their differences, the woods and sea settled down and the silence took over again. There was the persistent sound of acorns hitting the cobble on the beach as the oaks around me dropped them, but the silence was more than just the absence of sound. It was the sense that life along the coast and in the coastal forest itself was withdrawing, readying itself quietly for the coming frost and winter.

There were, remarkably, no sea birds. No gulls screeching and arguing, no ospreys or cormorants. Even the ducks that I startled later, when I began to forage, glided quietly into the water. The turkeys that startled me were subdued as well. The large Tom gobbled quietly at his flock, eyeing me as warily as I was eyeing him. We gave one another a wide berth, but I was taken by two things. The first being that I'd never encountered turkeys at the tide line before. Ever. The second, that they were so quiet. Turkeys are generally loud and aggressive. They're notoriously stupid birds (seriously. Look it up. The brain cell does not exist for them.) and for the Tom to be so non-reactive and quiet was, well, weird. We tiptoed around each other anyway, and carried on with our business quietly.

The ocean itself, although in flow, was also quiet. The water is cooling now, and cooling more rapidly as the ambient air temperature drops, and as the seasonal currents change. As the water cools, algal growth slows - and then stops, leaving the waters clear. You can see this in the perennially cold waters of the far north-Atlantic. In 2024, I took some footage of myself standing in the spring waters of the Gulf of Maine, but the waters up there are so cold that they're crystal clear. It didn't look like I was standing in water at all. Now, in October, the cool-down is speeding up (although not nearly as fast as it should be, nor as cold as it should be either).

All of this, the quiet settling, cooling, and clearing is part of the magic of October here along the New England coast. The cooling waters and quietening forests remind us that it is time ourselves to start going within and reflecting on what we still may need to do before the Long Dark arrives, and what we can do to nurture ourselves and find balance in our own lives.

The cooling waters bring us another meditative, reflective, October correspondence, too. As the waters clarify this month, we can take this time to sit at the water's edge and get clear on things that may have been hidden to us, or were perhaps muddied as we mulled them over in earlier months. Perhaps you do as I do, and bring a journal with you to help write your way to some sort of clarity as the month draws in, or maybe you simply sit and notice the many layers and textures of the quietening shoreline and woods around you, silently acknowledging the wheel of the year coming to a close once more.

Whichever you choose, remember that this, too, is the magic of October. It's not just Samhain and one could argue that Samhain, while a very important night this month, isn't the end all or be all of October either. Magic is all around us, every day, and Octobers bring an especially thick and textured magic to everything when you know where to look.