I love the dark half of the year. I love the changing colors, brief though their tenure is here in Fairbanks. I love the starry nights, the aurora overhead. I love the snow. The cold. The really really cold. The dark. I love the way the light lingers near the horizon and never ventures overheard. I love seeing the moon at night. I love the way that the dark half of the year invites us deeper. Requires us to seek out the warmth, the community, the intimacy of connection with our dearest ones. Sings to us of the depths of heart, offers a well of creativity into which to dive.

Today marks the cusp. The transition from light to dark. Today hovers at 12 hours of daylight, and this evening promises 12 hours of stars. Today marks our transition to the depths, as the pendulum of the year swings by.

This year, the cold and the dark brings with it a squirming squishy bundle of new life. My hibernation this winter will be sleepless but full of cuddles. A transition perhaps more profound than any I have conscious memory of. You may have to remind me of this in a couple of months when I am exhausted and on the verge of tears. But right now? Looking ahead? I truly look forward to sitting on the couch in front of the woodstove, raw and open and vulnerable to the tidal pull of new life and new love, shirtless with sore nipples as we figure out this breastfeeding thing, sitting on an herbal compress and letting my husband feed the fire and rustle up the meals. Nothing outside the triad of forming a family.

Equinox is a time of rooting down. Of pulling our energy from the branches and the world to nourish what is deepest and most necessary. What are your roots this season? How will you care for them?

Today I built shelves. A few days ago I was ripping out carpeting. It seems that my pregnancy nesting process as I enter the third trimester entails a whole lot more power tools, hammers and trips to Lowes than it does adorably tiny baby clothes. I mean, I've got a pile or three of teensy onesies, and a handful of a few large bags full of slightly larger adorable clothing for this child that just need to be re-folded and sorted by size. Its not like I'm immune to the charm of the tiny clothing.

But man, the siren call of shelving! As a child I always thought the "a place for everything and everything in its place" motto was laughable. Increasingly, I like the idea. Especially as I embrace the lifestyle changes that I hope and expect this child to bring with it: fewer long days in town, fewer days in town at all, more time on the homestead, more homebaked bread; I find myself less and less tolerant of the general malaise of spreading stuff that two adults –packrats at that!- living in a too-large house are prone to create.

It’s all a metaphor, really. Symbolic. The renovation and interior design work that preoccupies my mind of late is a way of making physical the spiritual and emotional and energetic process of this pregnancy. Of making space for baby. Of dreaming forth the mom I want to be, the woman I want to be. As I embrace this shift, I realize more and more just how much I've told certain dreams to wait, just how many aspects of myself I've tucked away for later. And their time is now. The baby's time is now. And baby deserves a space to live in that will nurture baby's growth, that will nurture baby's parents so that, as parents, we can do our best by baby.

And so my nesting process entails skill saws and screws as well as shuttles and yarn. It means undertaking renovations both major and minor to create functioning systems in this home of ours.