An autumnal offering
Okay, so I’m a little late on ushering in the new season. Just under a month. But! At least it hasn’t been a whole year since my last blog post. And how is your leaping going, by the way?
I’m taking just a little moment here to talk about what it means to allow ourselves– bodies, minds, hearts, spirits– to move into this new season. Summer is a season of activity, of movement. It is a more masculine, a more yang time. A time of drive, of feeling that thrust, if you will, that moves us forward into our days; the sun, rising earlier and setting later and extending the time spent in our glorious days, whatever that looks like for each us.
Autumn is a movement toward the feminine, a more yin part of the year. It is about starting to contain and cycle the energy that we feel down in our bellies, a beginning of this year’s journey deeper inside ourselves. It is offering an opportunity for more introspection, more time in the night– to sit in and with our own personal darkness (which we all have, so don’t even try to deny it). Of course, winter brings this even closer to our hearts with its quicksilver days and naked trees, but the very beginnings of this new sense of going down and deepening, deepening, deepening— these beginnings are a gift that do indeed get brought forth by autumn.
In some parts of the country, and I have lived in some of those parts, autumn sweeps in dramatically. The leaves turn glorious shades of gold, saffron, russet. That familiar crispness rises in the air, and the nostrils can scent a fire at least wanting to burn somewhere. Closets are turned over. Sleeves and layers are added. Warmth is sought.
But here in Tucson, it is more subtle than all that. And, while I have said before that I adore this climate, feeling at home with the lizards and other sunbathing creatures, already vowing never to leave it– I do recognize that there is an absence of that distinct arrival, the knock on the door that says, “Ding dong. Fall is here, lovelies.”
It has messed with me a bit, truthfully– this subtle change. Just the other day, I received an email from the calendar company where I ordered the one I presently own, telling me that it was time to get a move on it, and I thought, “What? This is like the candy aisles in the grocery having Halloween candy out in July.” But then I realized, despite the fact that the mercury is still stretching to the mid-nineties here every day, and may do so for another week, it is still autumn. The equinox back on the 23rd of September could not be wrong. Despite my many attempts to argue with the universe, I never win.
So, I had to check myself. I had to remind my body. And, it made me want to remind you too, just in case autumn didn’t bang into you either.
This is just the very briefest of invitations, for those of us residing in warmer locations with warmer climes where seasons do not sashay into the room. Let your entire person realize that the season has changed. Create a mental, emotional, and bodily shift– an awareness that this is a time to start moving more slowly. Let yourself. This is the time to start going inside your deepest parts, just a wee bit more. Let that happen. This is the time to allow whatever needs to fall, to fall. Whatever needs to die, to die. Whatever needs to lie fallow in the cold dirt before its rebirth in spring…. let it.
Take a moment. Breathe in the air of autumn. Now, breathe it out. And begin.
And, for those of you living in places that do clearly tell the story of seasonal change– I’d like to think that this is still good advice for you. I tip my little pink winter woolly beanie (which will be making its entrance as soon as it gets down below 60 in the mornings) in the direction of those beautiful places in this country, on fire with color; those places that live on this gorgeous, perfect, sweetest earth.
And… I still dig that I can probably wear a tee-shirt well after dark for another week.
Be well,
