Autumn love
I am starting a love affair today, oh yeah, with Autumn!
Today is the Autumn Equinox and there is no more denial, autumn is well and truly here. You could be deceived because the sun still has it, but the evenings are clearly cooler, the mornings are fresh and if you look carefully the leaves have started to turn. The rain is showing up a bit more often than in the past few weeks. There is an undeniable abundance everywhere you look. The garden is heavy with harvest, the hedgerows are laden with blackberries, damsons and wild apple.
I am grateful for the summer right now. Without the summer there could be no autumn abundance. All these fruits needed the sunshine, the rain and the warmth of the summer to grow and to ripen, to build up the sweetness and flesh.
I already started seeing the signs of the soon to arrive autumn a few weeks back. The giveaway was the delicate pink and white of the cyclamen growing underneath the trees in the forest. I was not ready for autumn then. I remember the pang I felt when I first spotted them; I knew they are heralding the autumn to come but I did not want to hear that. Not just yet. I still wanted the summer sunshine, the summer warmth, the sea – romancing the summer!
The wild chestnut tree on my drive is heavy with conkers. The orchard is packed with red juicy apples. The sunflowers are as tall as they can be in the garden. Autumn comes laden with gifts. Today the day and the night are equal, beautifully balanced until the night will start gaining a bit every day. It’s time to look at my personal garden and take in all that yield! It’s time to reap what I have sown. It’s definitely a time of celebration of the bounty; all the aspects of me that grew and yielded well this summer. It’s time to give thanks for those that showed up, for the plans that held good results. I wish to forget about the seeds I planted but didn’t do that well, maybe I’ll try again next year, who knows, the conditions might be better! For now I want to rejoice in the good! And slowly go within, with the autumn, with the rain, with the cold and the dark. I am mourning a bit the going of the sun, until next spring. But that is a reminder that all things must come to an end. Everything that has a beginning has an end.
My intention today is to meet autumn every day, until the winter solstice, come rain or shine; spend some time together, see where it takes us. I’ll take the camera with me and capture the one thing that catches my eye, the one thing that says autumn to me the most that day. Today it was blackberries, conkers and cyclamen. I’ll share some of it here, some I will keep just for myself. Autumn blessings everyone!
