Tag: autumn

I was born for autumn

I’m feeling in the mood for autumn. Meterological fall started August 31, but it hasn’t felt like fall lately given the 85+ degree weather, and astronomical fall won’t be for a couple more days.


Today, it’s raining outside, which puts me more in mind of fall. I like fall best because it is a season of introspection, of putting away the revelry of summer and taking stock of how many leaves I’ve seen fall in my life. The crisp mornings with scarlet and orange maple against the clear blue sky recall perfect moments, while the dark, icy rain reminds me of past travails.

I was born in autumn, born for autumn. It suits my dramatic side, the part of me who wants a black cape to walk through the whispering leaves. It suits the writer in me who wants to write of the dark corners of the psyche. 

I will welcome autumn with a cup of cider or a glass of brandy, toasting the harvest and the darkening nights.


Autumn is a great time to find oneself.

Autumn is a great time to find oneself.

Autumns force one into introspection, during those chill October drizzles that remind us that we have a home to go to, whether physical or spiritual or familial. Fog obscures the familiar and forces us to face the feelings of navigating in a strange world. Thunderstorms — the glory of October thunderstorms! — inform us that sometimes anger clears the air.

The indolent fantasies of summer — the beach books, the margaritas, the vacations where we swear we’ll move to San Francisco to start a coffeehouse or Florida to retire — fade in the wild emotions of autumn, where idyllic sunlight through golden leaves becomes the crystalline silence of frost or the bluster of a wind that knocks down piles of the golden leaves now fallen.

Autumn is my season. I want to be the blustering wind, the crystalline silence, the fierce storm. I want to broadcast my emotions and make others feel, flush them out of the hiding places of their summer, make them see the richness of the fiery leaves even as they spiral around us in the gust.

I want to be autumn, for it’s a great time to find oneself.

The Romance of the Storm

It’s a grey day outside == the temperature is dropping into the high thirties, and the leaves blow off the trees to make sodden yellow piles in my backyard. Any beauty autumn normally has seems lost in the grey sky, in the mist, in the cold.

It is because of this that autumn is the most romantic time in the world. Not so much because it’s tempting to go inside and cuddle with someone over jazz and hot chocolate, but because fall is tempestuous, and asks us to meet it wearing nothing but our starkest selves.

In spring, we hide behind our bright faces, wearing our delight like lambskin, meeting cute and gamboling through light conversations. In summer we discover the needs of our bodies and souls, and we don’t know how to articulate them.

In fall, we are scraped raw by the freshly sharp, cold wind. We are stripped from artifice like the denuded trees outdoors.  We have nothing but ourselves to offer. We are cold and hungry, shivering and in need.

There is nothing more romantic than the meeting of self to self without the trappings of status, prejudice, and superficial rules.

Autumn

I woke this morning, and something in the air had changed. For one thing, a chill had appeared and I had clutched extra blankets to myself in the night. The sun shone with a subtle golden aura that presaged what would come — the glorious russets of maple leaves, the burnished brown of oaks, the golden rain of locust trees, the delicate yellow of gingkos.

Autumn will always be my favorite season. The pagans I know believe that it is ruled by Herne, a powerfully built, dark protector of the forest, the Horned God. It’s easy for me to believe, as autumn broods in its mists and rainstorms, in-between its golden sun and clear, cool nights.

Autumn, even in its fiery glory, whispers: This will end soon. This will end in white, and cold, and you will huddle in your homes waiting for the world to renew again, as it has before.

Melancholy October

The clock on my computer reads 6 AM, and there’s no sign of light through the window.  The first day of autumn was a month ago, and the leaves of the trees I cannot see in the opaqueness of pre-dawn have shifted to brilliant russet and orange and yellow.

Fall breaks my heart, the way it wrings out the greatest beauty of the leaves before they die and blow away in spicy, earthy drifts. The rustle of leaf piles, the days and nights of rain from delicate sprinkles to sibilant showers to pounding gullywashers speak the truth of autumn, that it’s all about the last hurrah before the earth sleeps through the winter.

Flocks of starlings, like sooty leaves tumbled in a wind, wheel across the sky in everchanging patterns — billows grown big, then small; gathering for their migration south. The unprepossessing slate-colored juncos in their grey and white move in and outnumber the year-round drab sparrows. The cardinals stay through the winter, flashing red against the snow; seeing one seems like a promise that summer will come.

It is time to tuck away my summer fancies for those things that stay, that last through the winter. I will invite those friends to my hearth to drink hot chocolate and tell stories; I will welcome them as my own.

PS: Light and dark

You believe you know me because we have laughed together on a golden afternoon, as the first of autumn’s leaves turn gold and tumble lazily.
You do not know me until you have walked with me through sodden leaves on a night where the wind whips sleet in your face and white-hot forks of lightning bleed into your vision. Here, I am a witch, the child of the storm; I stand on a hill singing to the maelstrom.
You’ve only seen me laugh. I laugh because I’ve screamed; I smile because I’ve raged; I champion the wounded because I’ve been beaten. I rejoice because I have survived.

You cannot honor my light without accepting my darkness.