Madeleine L’Engle once borrowed this phrase for a story about time, light, and the battle between darkness and hope. I’ve borrowed it again because the title itself feels like a season—something on the move, as if the world were leaning toward winter. We speak that way every fall, saying the planet is “tilting” or “turning away from the sun,” when in truth it isn’t.
Earth’s axis holds firm, steady at twenty-three and a half degrees, like a door slightly ajar.
What changes isn’t the tilt but our relationship to the light.
As we orbit, the sun’s angle shifts across our sky, and everything else—shadow, temperature, mood—follows. It feels as if the world itself is sliding off balance, but the truth is simpler and more beautiful: the constancy of that angle is what gives us the seasons.
It’s a comfort to think that what feels like upheaval may really be motion around something faithful. From the ground it looks like the world is leaning; from a higher view it’s simply circling. We make that same mistake in life, confusing movement for instability, change for loss.
We even misunderstand warmth. Many assume winter comes when we’re farthest from the sun, but we are actually closest in January. Distance has little to do with heat. What matters is the angle of light—the long, shallow path it takes through our atmosphere before it reaches us. Warmth, it seems, depends less on proximity than on orientation, less on how near something is than on how it meets us. There are times when closeness doesn’t bring warmth, and times when distance preserves it. The geometry of grace works the same way.
By October, the hillsides begin to burn gold and red. We say the leaves “change color,” but that’s not quite right. Chlorophyll fades as daylight shortens, revealing pigments that have been there all along. The brilliance of fall is a revelation, not a transformation. It’s beauty by subtraction—what remains when something essential departs. Maybe that’s why the season feels sacred: it shows us that loss can clarify, that what’s been hidden under all our green striving might finally have its chance to shine.
A breeze moves through the branches, carrying that dry, papery scent of leaves about to let go—a small sound of the planet breathing.
Meanwhile, the ground beneath us is anything but still. We’re spinning at a thousand miles an hour and hurtling through space at sixty-seven thousand, yet we feel none of it. The air seems calm, the soil firm, the mountains rooted. We notice the wind in the trees but not the planet’s vast motion beneath our feet. Stillness, then, isn’t the absence of movement but the presence of balance. The same is true within us. What looks like quiet might be motion too subtle to feel, faith turning beneath the surface of an ordinary day.
Even the evergreens, those symbols of permanence, are quietly shedding. They lose a few needles at a time, slowly replacing the old with the new. Renewal doesn’t always announce itself; it can hide in constancy, in rhythms so small we overlook them. The pine doesn’t dramatize its seasons, yet it, too, participates in them. Perhaps steadiness is just another form of motion—one we’re finally patient enough to see.
So the planet isn’t really tilting after all. It’s turning with exquisite steadiness, carrying us through shifting relationships to light and shadow. The warmth we feel, the color we see, the calm we call stillness—all come from a constancy hidden within motion. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die… a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. Turn, turn. (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
Maybe that’s what L’Engle understood when she titled her book—that the world isn’t truly tilting, but we are. What feels like imbalance might just be our hearts learning again how to turn toward the sun.
