Doorway to the Season of Change
Ohhhhh, I love this morning. It feels as if last night’s spectacular sunset ushered in the change. After a week of mid-to-high 80s, warm water for swimming, afternoons so hot we had to do our outdoor things in the mornings and evenings, the change has come. It dropped cool, into the high 40s overnight here in the Catskill Mountains of southern New York state.
I love living here... where the most subtle of changes are felt in every breeze, every breath, and every cell of our bodies if we’re in tune. The constant shifting of the seasons is reflected in every leaf on every tree, and oh how our Autumns thrill me!
August 1st was the exact mid-point between the longest day and shortest night of the year (June
21st–Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox (Sept 21st,) when day and night will once again be equal. August 1st was exactly halfway between those two points on the wheel of the year. And those in-between times are the most magical, powerful times of all!
We’re a week past that point at this writing. It’s August 6th, and everything is suddenly changing.
It's time to shift from the lush and vibrant and active time of summer, a time of growing, growing, growing, to the time of the first harvest. Berries and sweet cherry tomatoes are ripening on their vines. The lettuces and greens are already going to seed. The color palette is changing, too. The yellow and gold flowers are coming out now, the black eyed susans and sunflowers and trefoil are everywhere, and the orange tiger lilies that grow in tall bunches along the roadsides, their stems so long and lean you wonder how they hold their heads up.
Last night, just before that wild sunset, I was walking the dogs around the pond, and I found a maple leaf on the ground, all orange and bright.
It’s a time of change. If you read Susan Miller’s Astrology Zone (every time I mention her, I use the term “eerily accurate”) then you know that change is in the stars as well, with a lunar eclipse tomorrow, August 7th in my sign, Aquarius, and a solar eclipse two weeks later (as always) on the 21st, in the opposite sign of Leo.
It's a time for change I intend to ride the wave of this energy as the month unfolds. I intend to focus on changes in my own life, on the things that are changing around me, and on the changes happening within me, and on the changes I want to make in myself and my reality.
The changes are based on what the year has taught me, from the silence and introspection of winter, to the thrilling unfurling and planting of spring, to the fun and celebration of growth and joy over the summer. Now we stand at the threshold of fall, the season I most closely associate with change. With transformation.
Like the plants , this is the time when all our growth processes of the previous year are coming to fruition. Fruit tastes differently, flowers are colored differently, stalks and grasses are taller or broader, corn cobs longer and narrower or shorter and fatter, all depending on the conditions of spring and summer.
Likewise, our past seasons determine the sort of fruits we harvest now. What were the lessons in all that has passed? How am I different from the person I was last fall? How do I want to be? How can I take all the experiences of the previous seasons and transmute them into the new me who is ripening for the harvest?
Time for review For me, time
will be spent in grateful review and deep appreciation. What were my biggest lessons of last winter, of last spring, of the fading summer? How do those all combine and what sort of fall fruit do they become? What is it I’m harvesting this season to take into winter with me?
I’ll be journaling about this from a state of deep gratitude, and seeing if I can come to a deeper, clearer understanding of the change I am about to manifest as I evolve with the seasons.
Did I mention, I love autumn? I freely admit every cell in me is absolutely vibrating with anticipation of the coming display of autumn in the Northeast. Oh, how I love it!
Thank goodness I live here. Thank goodness I get to experience this vivid, living art exhibit, painted by nature just for me, every single year I live on planet earth.
I am, quite simply, grateful.
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