Living Law Part III

The Silence Between Seasons

Part of the “Living Law” series, exploring ritual, skin, and the memory of land.
Originally written for The Brehon Academy.

There is a season that does not appear on calendars.

It lives between endings and beginnings,
a hush stitched through the turning of things.
The Irish once named this space an geimhreadh ciúin, the quiet winter, though it exists in every cycle, not only the cold.

It is the time when the land stops performing.
When buds sleep.
When tides lower their voice.
When skin, too, takes a breath.

Rest Is Part of the Law

In the Brehon world, law was not a rulebook; it was a rhythm.
The oak paused before budding.
The river thinned before the flood.
Fields lay fallow so they could feed again.

Every stillness had purpose.

To break this rhythm was not a sin; it was an imbalance.

Our modern culture struggles here.
We worship constant productivity, endless glow, and overnight results. Even the language of skincare echoes this urgency: instant, fast, active, corrective.

But what of the slow repair that asks for darkness and time?
What of the cell that needs stillness to remember its own shape?

The Season of Quiet Repair

In my own life, I call this the season of quiet repair.

It is when I pare everything back,
less exfoliation, less expectation, less noise.
The mirror becomes a pool again, not a performance.

Living along the Shipwreck Coast, I feel this season clearly.
In late winter, the ocean hammers less.
Its percussion softens.
The air turns mineral.
Plants pause.

The land teaches me to wait.

Law of the In-Between

In Irish tradition, there was always a law of the threshold, féth fiada, the mist between worlds where visibility fades, and insight sharpens.

Druids moved within this mist.
It was their classroom.

Skin has its own féth fiada.

Between inflammation and healing, there is a fog,
an in-between where new tissue forms unseen.
We rush to cover it.
To speed it.
To polish it away.

But if we stay with it,
the redness, the tenderness, the waiting,
We learn that patience itself is medicine.

Listening as Ritual

Each dawn, I step outside before speech.

I let the wind speak first.
Sometimes it carries salt.
Sometimes dust.

Listening without naming, this is the first ritual of stillness.

The Brehon judges were trained to listen longer than they spoke. They sat beneath oak canopies, waiting for law to reveal itself through pattern rather than force.

To apply this now, to land, skin, and work, is radical.

Listening is resistance.
It refuses the tempo of extraction.
It says: I will move at the speed of belonging.

Rest as Reciprocity

In many traditions, rest was an offering.

Fields were left fallow.
Fishermen paused with the moon cycles.
Communities slowed so land could breathe.

The modern equivalent might be simpler:
turning the phone face down after dusk,
skipping a product launch,
allowing the body a day without remedy.

My skin always thanks me for it.
So does the land.

Rest is not the opposite of creation.
It is the womb of it.

The Return

When the time comes to move again, it is gentle.

The oak does not burst; it unfurls.
The tide does not leap; it sighs back in.

When I begin creating again after a quiet period, I ask:

What season is the land in?
What is my own skin teaching me?

Some batches carry grounding woods.
Others, the sharp green of new growth.

The rhythm decides, not the market.

Closing the Circle

Perhaps your own skin or spirit feels caught in an in-between,
not old, not new, not certain.

Good.

You are standing in the silence between seasons.
That is where wisdom gathers.

Touch your face.
Feel its warmth.
Know that beneath the surface, a thousand quiet negotiations are taking place.

Do nothing.
Listen.

And let the silence do what it has always done,
restore the rhythm of the world beneath your skin.

Nala means earth.
And this is where we begin.

Aimee Louise Ní hÍceadha
Contemporary Druidess & Skin–Land Steward
Founder, Nala Native