Welcoming the Autumn Equinox
How Staying With Summer allowed me to be All In for Autumn (plus journal prompts and a repurposed poem)
I welcomed the Autumn Equinox yesterday after making a lot of noise in September about the fact that I wasn’t going to go quietly (and prematurely) into fall, without first savoring the last few sips of summer. I’m happy to say that resisting the temptation to turn the page from summer to autumn prematurely has proven so satisfying.
Fall is officially here, and I’m so glad I waited to get out the cooler weather clothes and the Halloween decorations. For me, encouraging myself to not toss away any of the edges of late summer this year (as I have done other years as soon as the calendar clicks over into September) allowed me to wake up yesterday and greet the quite sudden cooler weather with open arms. I really do feel like I savored so much of summer. Now that fall has arrived, and because I didn’t rush her coming, I feel genuinely glad to see her and don’t feel as much of the raggedy resentment that has plagued me other years when I’ve surrendered several weeks of summer in the name of retail campaigns and school schedules that plunge us into autumn before we are ready. I challenged myself to stay in the summer until it slipped away, and the reward for more patiently waiting has been sweet indeed.
Walking around my neighborhood yesterday morning, I admired the bronzed sunflowers, the deeply copper colored marigolds, and the dusty rose colored star shaped flowers of sedum. I saw raindrops like pearls perched on petals and leaves in the quiet of Sunday. Somehow, their brilliance was made more by the overcast skies and lingering rain drops from overnight storm.
Over the years, it’s become clear to me that with every change of season, I get terribly attached to What Has Been, which causes me to feel incredibly resistant to What Comes Next. I wiggle and wrestle against the shift, be it a natural season or a new chapter of my own life, and the result is twisting myself into an emotional and panicked pretzel, desperately trying to stop time from marching onward (as it always will) and somehow rewind and live in a specific part of the past forever.
Spoiler alert: despite what Doctor Who and Outlander would have us believe, we cannot roll back or bend time, and when we try to put the literal and metaphorical brakes on the clock, we can expect to suffer.
What I am entertaining more and more at the present time is the two sides of the change coin:
1.) I can become deeply attached to the past and present seasons and chapters of my life and get weepy and terrified when they begin to cycle into something else.
2.) I have the potential to get just as deeply attached to whatever comes next. Once I do, I find it hard to imagine ever letting go of the season I’m in, despite the fact that not so long ago, I could hardly be convinced to touch the season that I now find it impossible to let go of.
I grieve what must end for now - fast forwarding through the feelings you sense inside of you does not prove to be a sustainable way to move through life as a human being - and at the same time, I have learned to take more and more comfort in the idea that I will likely, one day, come to fiercely love living in the very chapter that I am currently resisting stepping into. It’s a simple idea but has proved so powerful when it comes to how I approach new seasons and new versions of myself.
Am I obsessed with summer picnics where I gorge myself on tiny, sweet strawberries from the farmers market and thumb through a mystery novel, whose pages I gobble up while sunning myself in the park in July? Yes. Am I also a fool for freshly picked apples from Kimball Fruit Farms in October, filling my kitchen perpetually with the scents of stewed apples throughout the fall? You bet.
My resistance is perpetual.
So is my love for what is seasonal in my life, be it the arrival of the way that fallen leaves litter the sidewalks like stars, or an ever-renewing enchantment with my favorite movies (Ghostlight, The Before trilogy), music (Shrike by Hozier, Vienna by Linda Eder, The Night Was Alive from the Titanic: A New Musical soundtrack) and books (The Secret Garden, Atonement).
The push and pull, the tension between the intimacy and the parting of ways with all that we love is what differentiates our days, makes them feel dynamic, and evokes in our chests the feeling that there are people, places, and experiences that tug at our very cells, allowing us to want to keep waking up each morning. We are the ocean and these ever cycling pleasures are the tides. Will we meet again today? Tomorrow? Stay in the moment, come in, go out, take step after step, and we will surely be reunited.
Change that we cannot control invites us via force to become reacquainted with flavors, feelings, and foundations that we otherwise might miss. If we didn’t put something down for a bit, we might not feel as much love as we do when we do pick it back up again.
It’s a welcome relief to learn that I am sad to let go, to leave something behind, not because I’m a grinch who dislikes all the things, but because I easily fall in love with the habits, the customs, the ways of each season, each in its own way, and learning to set them down for the time involves sitting with grief.
What if I can see the calendar this time of year not as a tyrant driving me into the depths of darkness and change, but as a compass offering to lead me back to things, people, and places I love? As a lighthouse pointing me towards the discovery of more ways to love living in this world? What if I can be led by love?
I shared the poem below in this newsletter last spring as I tried to work out what it means to plant seed that you may never see come to fruition.
Beauty Can Explode
Today I tucked a handful of hyacinth bulbs into the soil to sleep for the winter,
like queens clothed in purple, taking one last slumber before rising to power,
quietly becoming in the dark and cold,
unseen but living still.
Then in the first few Secret Garden days of spring,
when my heart longs for warmth,
they might just burst forth from the ground
(proof that beauty can explode into being from nowhere)
and announce that all long, hard things shall pass,
even our own darkness.
Corny as it feels to quote yourself, I found myself rereading the entire essay again and feeling grateful to past Melissa for this reminder:
“Looking back, I can see that tucking dreams (and seeds) into the dark (and the soil) was (and still is) the most active form of prayer. We hope with our hearts, we ask with our voices - yes. But we also must get to work with our own two hands, doing the work of fashioning a future from the fantasy we’ve nurtured for ever so long.”
This fall, I hope you find your hands holy enough for the harvest.
I wish you faith enough to push the seeds of something that means something to you into the dark, in hopes that it might arise when the light begins to returns and the grounds once again warms. Despite what we may think about the fall and winter months, the earth is not dead. Under the surface, the earth is doing the work of becoming in the dark, which is where most magic is made. May you offer yourself some small moments this season of getting quiet and considering how the surface is deceiving; often the most growth, gratitude, and gumption to “Go for it!” happens in the dark.
Some autumnal reflection journaling prompts for you:
What (or who) are you reacquainting yourself with this autumn?
What are you allowing to fall away or to be composted this fall?
What are you planting? What seeds are you tucking away into the dark, to make magic under the soil during the fall (and eventually) winter?
The gathering dark is, as a dear friend put it recently, a time to gather close with people we love and share stories with one another to get us through the cold. As such, I’d love to hear from you, below, about what you are keeping close to you during this seasonal shift. I am so grateful to be part of this community with all of you.