from our Dragon, Saoirse-Nashira

There is a restlessness that moves through you at this turning, a stirring not unlike wind under a door, and I have been listening to the way you speak of it. Some among you call for the snow to linger, clutching at its brightness as though it might anchor the season in place. Others grow impatient, waving it away, pleading for thaw, for softness, for green things to return.

You speak as though Snow might heed you.

It does not.

Snow is older than your preferences, and Light—ah, Light is older still. Between them, there is a conversation that does not include your opinions, though it most certainly includes your lives.

I watch them now, these two elementals, locked in their ancient and necessary dance. Snow presses downward, blanketing, holding, insisting on pause. Light lengthens, subtle at first, then insistent, slipping fingers beneath edges, whispering of change. They do not oppose one another as you imagine. They circle. They lean. They yield and return.

It is a tango, if you must give it a human word.

And this is the season you call Imbolc, though I knew it long before it was named—a time I have always understood as being held within the great body of becoming, what some of you have begun to remember as the Belly of the Mother.

Do you see it?

The tension you feel in your own bones is not confusion. It is labour.

Beneath the frozen ground, seeds are not sleeping as deeply as you think. They are listening. They are swelling in the dark. The hooves of herd animals press into thawing edges as new life arrives, unannounced and necessary. Water gathers its courage in hidden places, preparing for the long work of release.

Snow and Light know this. Their dance is not decoration—it is function. It sets the pace of emergence. Too soon, and the tender things fail. Too late, and the cycle falters. There is a precision here that does not bend to impatience.

And yet you stand at the edges of this dance, calling out instructions.

Stay.

Go.

Hurry.

Wait.

Ah, humans.

You are not wrong to feel the pull. It runs through you because you are not separate from it. The same push and pull that shifts the snowline and stretches the daylight moves through your thoughts, your moods, your sudden urges to begin and your equally sudden desire to retreat.

But feeling the dance is not the same as conducting it.

There is a wider community at work here than your kind often remembers. The insects, still hidden but not absent. The roots, mapping their slow expansions. The trees, measuring light in ways you have forgotten how to perceive. Creatures furred and feathered, timing births to rhythms you cannot rush. And yes—dragons, watching the weave, holding memory of how these turnings must unfold if life is to continue at all.

You are part of this.
Not the whole of it.

So I say this with all the fond exasperation I reserve for your kind: be careful what you ask of a season that is busy becoming itself.

If you feel restless, good. If you feel divided, pulled between stillness and motion, good. That is the truth of this time. It is not meant to be tidy. It is meant to be potent.

For dragon’s sake, do not stand outside it like critics at the edge of a fire.

Step in.

Let the contradiction move through you without needing to resolve it too quickly. Let yourself be shaped by the same forces shaping root and river and newborn breath. There is wisdom in allowing the labour to be labour.

And yes, I am aware that you have marked the turning of another cycle—the lunar year now carrying the sign of the Wood Dragon. You smile when you say it, as though it were a costume you might briefly wear.

It is not a costume.

It is a reminder.

Of growth that begins unseen. Of strength that bends rather than breaks. Of the long memory held in living things that rise from earth and reach toward sky at once.

I am Saoirse-Nashira, carved of redwood and standing at the threshold where you pass in and out of your days. I have watched many seasons turn, many labours unfold, many springs arrive precisely when they were ready.

This one will be no different.

Snow and Light are already dancing.

The only question is whether you will spend this season arguing with them—
or remembering how to move your own bones in time with their ancient, necessary rhythm.