The Wild Reed

Friday, September 04, 2026

Kadeem Announces His Next Show

One of my favorite dancers, Kadeem Hosein (known as Kadeem En Pointe), has recently announced a second live / live-stream show. It’s a re-imaginging of Act II of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker entitled “A World of Our Own” (For a review of Kadeem’s first show, “All the World’s a Stage,” click here.)

Following is Kadeem’s description of his December 19 show, along with his reasoning for encouraging folks to buy their ticket early.

__________________

I want to explain why booking early for my next show genuinely matters to me. My mission with everything I’m doing is to make ballet more accessible – financially, physically and emotionally.

I want to reach people who may never have seen a ballet before. People who have never felt represented or welcomed within ballet. People who love the art form but can’t easily get to a theatre because of where they live, accessibility, travel or cost.

That is a huge part of why I’m putting on this production in December. The Nutcracker is known around the world by even those who don't know ballet. This is an opportunity to really get the art form I love in front of so many people in a fresh (and hopefully exciting!) way.

For the in-person performance, I’ve deliberately priced 60% of the theatre at just £25 because I want a significant part of the auditorium to remain genuinely affordable.

The difficult reality is that, by doing that, even a completely sold-out theatre would only recoup around 35% of the planned production budget.

That means the livestream is an enormous part of making this possible.

The livestream this time isn’t an afterthought. It is central to what I’m trying to build. It means somebody thousands of miles away can experience the production at the same time as somebody sitting in the theatre, or even catch up for 14 days after if they can’t watch live but still want to be a part of this.

But because this is independently produced, many of the costs have to be committed to months before I know how many people will ultimately watch.

That’s why when you book matters almost as much as whether you book.

If you know you want to watch the performance, it would make an extraordinary difference to how much progress I could make towards funding the production if you booked right now.

It would give me the confidence to keep moving forward with not just this show but with what comes after it. More productions. More opportunities for artists. More accessible tickets. And perhaps, eventually, the opportunity to take this work to audiences in other cities and countries too.

So if you already know you’re going to watch, either on YouTube from anywhere in the world or with us at the theatre in London, I would be incredibly grateful if you booked early.

And I mean what I say about accessibility. If you genuinely want to watch the livestream but the ticket price is currently beyond what you can afford, please send me an email. I don’t want finances to be the reason somebody who wants to experience the production has to miss it.

Every booking helps me prove that there is an audience for a different way of making ballet – one that can be ambitious but still fairly priced and accessible at the same time.

I really hope we can keep building that together! ❤

Kadeem

Are you interested in supporting Kadeem beyond purchasing a ticket to his new show?

Well, you can join me in making a one time or recurring donation. Another way is by purchasing a copy of his most recent creative project. I’ll let Kadeem say more . . .

My new coffee table book The Pointe Of Passion is now available for you to have in your home. I hope that this book can serve as a reminder of perseverance and passion and can maybe insipire at least one person to find their passion – whatever that might be 🖤

Trust me, it’s a beautiful publication. My copy arrived in the mail just last week!

Here’s more about the book from Kadeem's website:

The Pointe of Passion is the first true photographic archive curated by Kadeem En Pointe, bringing together more than a decade of images captured in locations around the world. It is printed as a premium 98 page, 8 × 10 inch hardback coffee table book.

From the earliest photographs en pointe in public to the work being created today, this coffee table book traces an artistic journey through pointe shoes, tutus, public spaces and more. Alongside already shared images are never-before-seen photographs, offering an intimate look at the evolution of a project that has challenged perceptions of who ballet is for.

More than a collection of photographs, The Pointe of Passion is an exploration of becoming. It asks who ballet has traditionally made room for and what becomes possible when those boundaries begin to shift. It is a celebration of passion and the belief that beauty can be found and created in the most unexpected places.

Unlike many coffee table books, The Pointe of Passion has been published entirely independently. Every stage of its creation – from curating the archive to designing, printing and fulfilling each order – is funded and managed by Kadeem, allowing the project to remain true to the vision that has guided it from the very beginning. Every purchase directly supports the continued creation of independent ballet projects that seek to make the art form more accessible.

Signature and personalisation will be added to the first blank page on the inside, unless otherwise requested.

Click here to purchase The Pointe of Passion.

Related Off-site Links:
Kadeem’s Official Website
“Being a Ballet Dancer Is Years of Hard Work, But It’s All Worth It” Says Kadeem En Pointe – Stuart Norval (France 24, February 26, 2026).
Men en Pointe: Ballet Dancers Kick Against Gender Stereotypes – Matilda Martin (The Guardian, March 10, 2021).

For previous posts about Kadeem, see:
• Kadeem
• A Message in Dance That Challenges, Inspires and Liberates
• Kadeem En Pointe: Finding Freedom in Dance
• A Mesmerizing Performance

See also the following dance-related Wild Reed posts:
• The Soul of a Dancer
• The Trouble with the Male Dancer – Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
• Dancer Calvin Royal III: Stepping Into His Light
• The Premise of All Forms of Dance
• The Art of Dancing as the Supreme Symbol of the Spiritual Life
• The Power of Dance
• “Then I Shall Leap Into Love”
• Love’s the Only Dance
• We All Dance
• Not Whether We Dance, But How
• The Dance of Life
• And As We Dance . . .
• Our Dance
• “I Came Alive With Hope”
• Finding Balance in the Presence of the Beloved
• Our Bodies Are Part of the Cosmos
• Flexibility and Flow
• Move Us, Loving God
• A Prayer for Dancers
• Trusting the Flow
• Aristotle Papanikolaou on How Being Religious Is Like Being a Dancer

Image: Photo by @mandyleft

Photo of the Day

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Where We Belong
• Heavy Seas and Grey Skies
• Autumn Sky
• Photo of the Day – June 17, 2023
• Storm Clouds Over Minneapolis
• Photo of the Day – December 7, 2019
• Photo of the Day – September 4, 2019
• Sunset Reflections and Vapour Trail
• Photo of the Day – April 8, 2019
• Photo of the Day – July 13, 2017
• Bde Maka Ska Sunset
• Bde Maka Ska Skies
• Photo of the Day – August 19, 2014
• Photo of the Day – June 18, 2010
• Pacific Skies

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Thursday, September 03, 2026

Progressive Perspectives on the Legacy of Gloria Steinem

Before becoming one of America’s most celebrated “feminist” icons, Gloria Steinem [who died yesterday in New York City at age 92] first participated in a CIA-backed anti-communist project that organized American youth participation in anti-communist international festivals during the Cold War. She later publicly acknowledged the CIA connection and defended her involvement. Her actual history matters because CIA anti-communism was not some politically neutral commitment to democracy; it was deeply entangled with U.S. imperialism, the suppression of freedom movements, and the policing of which forms of liberation were considered acceptable.

And that contradiction matters when we talk about her white feminism.

The feminism that became nationally legible was disproportionately shaped by white, middle-class women whose experiences were often treated as universal, and Steinem helped facilitate that process. Meanwhile, Black women, Indigenous women, women of color more broadly, and working-class women had long been articulating forms of liberation that could not be reduced to gender alone. Women confronting colonialism, racism, and economic exploitation understood that oppression operates through multiple, interconnected systems, not through a single axis of inequality.

That is the structural violence of white feminism: it can oppose forms of sexism that harm privileged women while reproducing racial and class hierarchies over whose suffering is centered, whose politics are considered legitimate, and who gets remembered as the face of women’s liberation.

We do not need to pretend Steinem was responsible for feminism.

Not now. Not ever.

– Layla Rafaoui
via social media
September 3, 2026

I had to deal with the twisted legacy of Gloria Steinem constantly as a writer, educator and activist from Toledo, Ohio, which was also her home town where she was born and raised. She was held up as some kind of revolutionary saint despite doing more harm than good for this world. Instead of the mythology built up around her, her actual story tells a very different reality about what she stood for. In my eyes she reduced feminism to a shallow identity politics devoid of class and race politics and completely devoid of a critique of the devastating policies of the U.S. Empire around the world. She was a tool of the elite forces from her career as an anti-communist operative for the CIA, her long lasting friendship with Henry Kissinger, to her campaigning for zionist war criminal Hillary Clinton and coming up with the Bernie Bros slander.

Many of the headlines commemorating the death of Gloria Steinem at 92 read like this: “Feminist icon, trailblazer, journalist.” They leave out one very salient episode of her career: Steinem’s years as a paid CIA operative running the anti-communist Independent Research Service in the late ’50s and ’60s. There was, of course, nothing “Independent” about the “service.” It was an agency front group, fully funded by the CIA. The “research” it did was on left-leaning student activists, often conducted by sending undercover operatives to spy on their activities on campuses and at youth festivals. Though Steinem eventually cut ties with the Agency, her brand of feminism downplayed class-based politics.

– Jeffrey St. Clair
via social media
September 3, 2026

Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has passed away. I must admit, when I observed her career early on I was enthralled with her journalism and organizing. But as the months turned into years, she was sadly absorbed into the very system she fought against.

Here’s some evidence: After several government documents were declassified, it was revealed Steinem worked for the CIA. From 1958 to 1962, Steinem served as the director of the Independent Research Service (IRS), an organization established and funded by the CIA. Its mission was to counter Soviet influence at youth events worldwide, specifically by sending American non-communist students and activists to the World Youth Festivals in Vienna (1959) and Helsinki (1962).

When the magazine Ramparts exposed widespread CIA funding of youth and student groups in 1967, Steinem spoke openly about her role. She confirmed that she knew the CIA was bankrolling the organization and defended the arrangement. Steinem famously stated that “if I had a choice I would do it again.”

Transitioning into the 1990s, Steinem became a defender of the sexual predator, Bill Clinton. She drew sharp criticism for a March 1998 New York Times op-ed titled “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” in which she defended President Clinton against allegations made by Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky. Steinem wrote that even if the allegations were true “for the sake of argument,” Clinton was not guilty of sexual harassment and argued that his conduct amounted to a “clumsy sexual pass.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, she was a surrogate for Bill Clinton’s war criminal wife, Hillary Clinton. During an appearance on Bill Maher’s program, she suggested young women were only joining Bernie Sanders’ campaign to meet boys. She told Maher, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, 'Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’” She later apologized.

For me, I place Steinem in the same category as a figure like Noam Chomsky: people I recognized as heroes, only to be disappointed and let down as they were slowly absorbed into the Deep State and neoliberal structure. Yes, I don’t deny Steinem inspired a lot of women, but how many of those women know the aforementioned about her?

– Dorothy Lennon
via social media
September 3, 2026

Gloria Steinem worked for the CIA and called its members “enlightened,” “liberal,” and “honorable.” She never apologized and instead said she “would do it again.” The CIA overthrew governments, propped up dictators, murdered opponents, and aligned itself with the most oppressive forces on the planet. Its interventions led to severe and systematic repression of women in countries around the world. Some of its agents used sexual abuse as a technique of coercion. Workplace sexual abuse was common within its own ranks. And the agency itself systematically discriminated against women. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theater?”

– Craig Mokhiber
via social media
September 3, 2026

Steinem’s concept of a “liberated woman” (who, as she quipped, has sex before marriage and a job after) directly contradicted the the very heart of the radical movement’s argument – that women are oppressed as a class and can’t make themselves free individually.

Where did her politics come from? She seemed to have one foot in the establishment from the start, dating John F. Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen; then Franklin Thomas, who would soon lead the Ford Foundation; and, in the 1980s, real estate developer Mortimer Zuckerman. Vivian Gornick recalled, “Gloria was uptown; we were downtown. She hung out with Establishment figures; we had only ourselves.”

[. . .] By the late 1980s, Steinem was famous for Ms. and for being the radical feminist but had not yet written a book laying out her vision of feminism (the anthology Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions in 1983 collected her writing in Ms. and elsewhere).

When it finally came, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992) affirmed everything about her politics that had dismayed the radicals who started the movement. The book, which received a six-figure advance, continued the women’s magazine line that women needed to make internal changes.

“Without self-esteem, the only change is an exchange of masters; with it, there is no need for masters,” she wrote. Of course, we don’t have masters because we need them but because they need us. This basic inversion was symptomatic of her politics.

By contrast, women’s liberation feminists argued that women, like other oppressed people, are in constant struggle against our bonds – a concept they called the “Pro-Woman Line” – in fact, we take every bit of space available and find ingenious workarounds even when there is none. It was discrimination, exploitation, punishment, and constant everyday pressure that constrained us. This hard-won analysis was developed through the main program of the movement, consciousness-raising.

Ms. watered down this important organizing tool, publishing a guide to consciousness-raising that used the name and the form but missed the substance, reducing it to a therapy group where women blew off steam and got sisterly support. The original idea was to use the data that emerged in testimony to assess women’s true situation, dig at the root cause, and analyze who benefits. The program was inspired by the Southern civil rights movement’s “tell it like it is” public testifying and had parallels in the Chinese Revolution’s “speak bitterness” sessions. It was not intended as a safe space.

As corporate attacks in the late 1970s and early ’80s destroyed unions and working-class living conditions and wages plunged for all workers, Betty Friedan and feminist radicals alike argued that advancing women’s equality now required confrontation with corporate power to get guarantees of childcare and health care, paid family leave, and shorter work hours for everyone. Friedan called it the “second stage” of feminism in a book by that name. Redstockings called for the abolition of private health insurance companies and a robust social wage, to give women independence from men and employers.

The Ms. wing of the movement fragmented into thousands of non-profits, competing for grants from rich people by each proposing “winnable” small-bore solutions to the wreckage left by the employer offensive. This blinkered feminist vision was reflected in the Democratic Party establishment. Meanwhile, long hours, low pay, and worsening conditions for raising kids made women vulnerable to a right-wing nostalgia for to the “glorious thirty” postwar years of family-supporting jobs and stay-at-home moms.

[. . .] Women’s liberation movement pioneers, to a woman, came out of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the student left. They believed that consistent feminism leads to socialism, and vice versa. Following Simone de Beauvoir, they wanted to dig deep and abolish the exploitation of women and the oppression required to maintain it. Starting in the 1960s, they planned and built a successful radical movement that profoundly changed the situation of women in the United States and reverberated worldwide.

It’s a crime that their movement was for fifty years personified by someone who never shared its goals.

– Jenny Brown
Excerpted from “Gloria Steinem Was the
Godmother of Neoliberal Feminism”
Jacobin
September 4, 2026

As the media machine prepares to unleash a flood of fawning tributes, the usual suspects will inevitably honor Gloria Steinem – a spectacle revealing little about liberation and everything about their own bankrupt politics, brazen opportunism, willful blindness to historical fact, and the hackneyed claims to “complexity” and “nuance” held so dear by these intellectual mercenaries.

How does one assess a life after it ends? Those who benefit and are in a good position in this system will honor Gloria Steinem for contributing to stabilizing a system oppressive to many and dis-aligning them from revolutionary ideas – this is not what women want and need.

The death of Gloria Steinem will undoubtedly unleash an avalanche of sanitized obituaries, performative tributes, and ruling-class hagiography. Western media will mourn her as a “groundbreaking icon” and a pioneer for gender equality. But for the global majority – the millions of women across the Third World and the working-class masses who remain crushed beneath the boot of imperialist exploitation – her passing marks the end of a legacy that fundamentally weaponized feminist rhetoric to protect the empire.

Steinem did not liberate women; she weaponized women’s liberation to serve the interests of U.S. hegemony. The foundational sin of her career was never a mere footnote: her early leadership of the CIA-backed Independent Research Service in the late 1950s and 1960s was explicitly designed to undermine anti-imperialist, socialist, and communist youth movements at international youth festivals. When exposed, Steinem didn’t apologize; she defended the covert arm of the U.S. imperialism, describing its operatives as "liberal and honorable." This was not an innocent blunder of youth, but the blueprint for her entire career.

Through Ms. magazine and her manufactured status as the singular, polished face of “second-wave feminism,” Steinem pioneered a dangerous model of liberal counter-insurgency. As radical feminists, Black panthers, and anti-capitalist women were rising up to demand the dismantling of the triad of imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, Steinem offered a palatable alternative: bourgeois, reformist faux feminism.

This imperial feminism detached gender oppression from its economic and geopolitical roots. It told American women that liberation meant climbing corporate ladders, breaking glass ceilings inside warmongering state institutions, and achieving parity within an exploitative system – all while the very empire housing them carpet-bombed, starved, and destabilized nations across the Global South. By framing patriarchy as an abstract cultural enemy separate from class struggle and U.S. military domination, her brand of activism effectively depoliticized the feminist movement and severed its solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles worldwide.

It was precisely this co-optation that radical groups like Redstockings rightly called out in 1975. They recognized Ms. magazine and Steinem’s elevated media stature as a parallel organization meant to channel radical anger into benign electoral politics. When challenged on her intelligence connections and corporate backing, her apparatus used legal threats and publishing pressure to suppress internal dissent, silencing the very radical women whose ideas she had watered down and monetized.

For the global majority, Steinem’s legacy is not one of freedom, but of co-optation. Her pro-imperialist ideology gave feminist cover to U.S. soft power, making Western liberal democracy look progressive while its economic structures continued to siphon labor and resources from women in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. She normalized a brand of identity politics that allows female CEOs, drone operators, and politicians to be celebrated as triumphs for “womanhood,” even as their actions inflict violence on millions of impoverished women globally.

We must refuse the myth-making that surrounds her death. True liberation for women will never come from the handshakes of CIA handlers, corporate sponsors, or ruling-class media elites. It will come from the destruction of the imperialist, capitalist structures that Steinem worked so tirelessly to legitimize. Her death should serve as a stark reminder: a feminism that aligns itself with the empire is no feminism at all – it is merely the soft edge of oppression.

– Sarah Raymundo
“An Anti-Requiem for Gloria Steinem,
A Cold War Icon (1934-2026)”
via social media
September 3, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Gloria Steinem, Trailblazing Journalist and Activist, Dies at 92 – Juliana Kim (NPR, September 3, 2026).
Gloria Steinem Was the Godmother of Neoliberal Feminism – Jenny Brown (Jacobin, September 4, 2026).
Gloria Steinem: The CIA, White Feminism, Intersectionality and COINTELPRO – United Panther Party (September 3, 2026).
Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem Was An Anti-Communist CIA Operative Who Kept Feminism From Discussing Class – Medium (February 11, 2024).

UPDATE: Gloria Steinem’s Legacy Is Messier Than Her Defenders or Her Critics Want to Admit – Stacey Patton (Dr Stacey Patton, September 5, 2026).

Image: Glenn Lowson.

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

The “Threshold Month” of September

September never arrives all at once. It comes quietly through cooler mornings, earlier sunsets, ripening berries and the first leaves beginning to turn. Summer may still be holding the afternoons, but something in the air has changed. The light is softer. The shadows are longer. The evenings are asking us to come home.

This is a threshold month, neither entirely summer nor fully autumn. It gives us time to notice what is fading, gather what we want to keep and prepare for the darker months ahead. You may feel drawn to clean your altar, light candles earlier, return to neglected books or make your home feel warmer and safer. Follow that pull. Your body often recognises the changing season before the calendar does.

September is standing with the door open. What are you ready to carry through?

– Hex and Shadow Chronicles
via Facebook
September 1, 2026

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Crowned Spirit of the Wild
• First Signs of “By Far the Most Paradoxical” Season
• Late Summer Blooms – 2025 | 2016
• Summer’s End – 2024 | 2021
• Threshold Musings

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

“Complex, Brilliant, Revolutionary”: Remembering Wendell Berry, 1934-2026

Writes Julia Conley . . .

The death of poet, activist, and conservationist Wendell Berry on Monday [August 31, 2026] was called by one labor organizer “a loss of morality and clarity and compassion,” as admirers of Berry’s lifelong crusade to defend the environment honored his memory by sharing favorite poems and other works.

Berry died at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he spent decades writing about his farming the land, teaching, and writing about the need to fight “the concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands,” as he wrote in one of his best-known works, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

“The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land,” wrote Berry in the essay collection, published in 1977.

He stressed that the “increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines” in the agricultural sector “is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance.”

The Unsettling of America was one of more than 50 works published by Berry, whose commitment to interdependent community-building, small farms, and the protection of nature was woven into his fiction, poems, and essays alike.

In America magazine in 2021, Jon Sweeney wrote in a review of What I Stand On, a collection of Berry’s writing, that “he writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know.”

“The natural world is his primary teacher: its rhythms, its largesse, its mysteries,” Sweeney wrote. “And in the essays, the natural world often reflects how change in humans is also natural, inexplicable, and possible. I think this is what many who love his writing appreciate most about Berry, whether they realize it or not.”

Berry traveled and taught briefly at New York University as a young man before returning to his Kentucky roots, remaining there for six decades. He told The New York Times in 2018 that writing and working in rural Kentucky “made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape. The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them.”

In his 1969 essay “The Long-Legged House,” named for the two-room cabin his ancestors had lived in, to which Berry returned to write his books and other works, he offered an early warning about the harm humans and their industries – agribusiness and fossil fuels – were doing to the Earth.

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world,” wrote Berry. “We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

The writer Joyce Carol Oates said on social media on Monday that “long before it became a more familiar subject, Wendell Berry was conscious of the endangered natural environment; indeed, Berry helped to raise this consciousness.”

In addition to making his views on the environment and corporate control over the natural world known through his writing, Berry took part in direct actions to protest mining, war, and capital punishment.

He rallied against the U.S. war in Vietnam, saying, “Peace is more important than victory,” and was arrested in 1979 for protesting the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. Thirty years later he was one of thousands who marched on Washington against the Capitol Power Plant, and two years after that, in 2011, Berry spent the night at a sit-in in the Kentucky governor’s office to protest mountaintop removal mining.

In 2009 he also withdrew his writings from the collection of University of Kentucky, his alma mater, to express opposition to the university’s $7 million donation from a coal producer; the school then named a dormitory Wildcat Coal Lodge.

“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” Berry told the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, at the time. “In the long run, the top soil, the forests, and the woodland of this state will be more valuable than the coal deposits.”

Silas House, another writer who hailed from Kentucky, said that with Berry’s death, “another great light” had gone out.

House described the writer as “complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary.”

– Julia Conley
“Wendell Berry, Writer and Activist Who Fought
Corporate Takeover of U.S. Farming, Dies at 92”
Common Dreams
September 1, 2026

Related Off-site Links:
Beloved Writer and Environmentalist Wendell Berry Has Died at Age 92 – Tilda Wilson and Noah Adams (NPR News, September 1, 2026).
‘Another Great Light Gone Out’: Kentucky Author and Activist Wendell Berry Dies at 92 – Linda Blackford (Lexington Herald Leader, September 1, 2026).
Wendell Berry, Kentucky-born Author Who Advocated a Simpler Life, Has Died at 92 – Hillel Italie (Associated Press via PBS News, September 1, 2026).
What Wendell Berry Taught Me About Heaven – Russell Moore (Christianity Today, September 2, 2026).

Image: Wendell Berry reads one of his poems at the 2014 Festival of Faiths. (Photo: Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Monday, August 31, 2026

August Vignettes

Sunday, August 30, 2026

The Crowned Spirit of the Wild

As summer weakens and the forest turns towards autumn, the stag becomes the crowned spirit of the wild. His antlers resemble bare branches holding the final light of the year, while their yearly shedding reflects the ancient rhythm of loss, renewal and returning strength.

In European folklore, the stag belonged to thresholds. He could lead hunters away from familiar paths, appear before encounters with the Otherworld and run through the darkness alongside the Wild Hunt. He represented sovereignty that could not be granted by human hands: instinctive, untamed and rooted in the land.

The stag does not mourn the fading sun. He carries it between his antlers, guiding its fire into the darker half of the year.