We all have at least one ritual for marking the turn from winter to spring. For some, it’s cleaning out the house, for the ancient Celts it was pouring porridge into the sea. According to Orkney legend, the Vore Tullye (spring equinox) was in fact a fierce battle between the Teran, the spirit of winter and Sea Mither - the life giving summer sea - the two clashing spectacularly as one season gave way to the next.

 

What unites these ideas is a feeling of forward movement, change, release and, hopefully, progress.

 

Of course, while northerners shed clothing and emerge from hibernation, in the southern hemisphere the days are growing colder and shorter, as the autumn brings its own rites of passage: carrying plants indoors, taking stock of warm clothes and blankets. The feeling is less one of movement and change than of protection and hunkering down.

 

This issue of The Signal House Edition intertwines both poles of movement and reflection, whether traversing the M25 to bear witness to the end of a life, searching the night sky for extraterrestrial life, or meditating on the meaning of Americanness in Paris, in this spring/autumn marked by the advent of war and the glimmer of a precarious path out of the Covid pandemic, we hope these journeys give you plenty to ponder and some fuel to help you keep moving forward.

 

-The Editors, May 2022