Today we celebrate Autumn Equinox - that moment in the year when day and night are of equal length. Our hedgerows are bursting with blackberries and, as Keats once wrote, summer's warm, golden days are gently fading into the "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness". 'Equinox' comes from the Latin, meaning 'equal night', and today holds bittersweet wisdom within its balance of light and dark...
Let go of anything you cannot control
At harvest time, farm labourers go out into the fields and look around them to take stock of what has grown.
The land reveals the rewards of our efforts - and, just as it is with life, it also reveals that some things are beyond the scope of our control, such as unfavourable weather conditions that spoil the crop and result in a poor harvest.
No matter how hard we try, we cannot control the outcome of everything.
In many ways, control is simply an illusion. We can never know with exact certainty what is around the next corner. Ultimately, so much of life is beyond our control.
Autumn Equinox reminds us that we can only do our best and to go gently on ourselves, to release our grip on things we cannot control, and let go like the falling leaves.
Harvest your memories and store up their lessons
Equinox and harvest remind us of this: that our life is like a field, and we are the farmer.
Farmers traditionally pick crops and gather them to store over the wintertime, and we too may harvest our memories and store them up.
When you look back over the year so far, see your memories as a crop, ready to be cut, collected, and sorted.
Soon the nights will draw in at pace, and we will reach for the cosy comfort of the fireside to keep us snug, but as we sift through our memories, may they keep us warm.
May we let the ones that have not yet ripened as we wished, or that leave us cold, serve as kindling, illuminating what is most important as we step forward into a new season.
We may wish to consider our answers to these seasonal journaling prompts:
What have we planted, and what seeds have we sown?
What is ripening, and what are the fruits of our labours?
What feels most abundant and nourishing for us right now?
At this time of balance, we may also wish to consider:
What has been a poor harvest for us, and has not been fruitful?
What have we yielded (or not) from our efforts, and what wisdom can we gather from this?
Try not to judge yourself, or to look solely at your life as a tick-list of productivity. Oftentimes, the most fruitful harvests are not tangible in a material sense, but rather centre around personal growth and how we feel intrinsically.
When we eat a blackberry, the tart and sweet taste balances perfectly on our tongue. Let us pluck the moments of our year like blackberries, then, tasting it all. Without the sourness, the sweet would not be quite so sweet. Let us feast on our memories, preserving the ones we enjoyed the most, and bottling the wisdom, however bittersweet, of all we have experienced. Let us not gaslight our own emotional experience, however, by telling ourselves that every sour moment must be savoured. Let us only seek the wisdom from such a memory so we may grow through it.
Nature has its seasons, and so do we.
Follow your rhythms and balance effort with rest.
So often, at this point in the year, we feel as if time is racing by, as if we are saying goodbye to summer when we haven't yet done all we wanted to do - but as one season comes to a close, another one takes its place.
Change is the only certainty, and as the year turns once more, we now say hello to autumn, welcoming all its richness and russet-gold beauty.
Each season is a fresh start, and we see how autumn is a perfect foil for spring and summer's active energy, allowing us to do the hard work of harvest, whilst also building in moments to rest, reflect, and restore.
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