MABON: A Walking Ritual
Today the sun is so bright I have to wear my favorite straw hat to shade my eyes. It’s beaming as strongly as ever, it seems. But the sun is rising a little later these days, and setting a little earlier, and the night is spilling ever so gently in around the edges.
It’s crisp this morning. I saw tiny patches of frost in the deeper grasses during our early morning walk with Roxanne, our problem-child, 8-year-old English Mastiff. Her black mask face is going white, and she’s been depressed since the passing of our little bulldog, Niblet. The two had to be kept separated because they wanted to fight. So odd how deeply Roxy misses her now. But she was a part of our little pack and we’ve all felt the loss.
Autumn soothes my soul. It’s the year’s waning phase, and yet its most beautiful. And really it highlights not dying, but fulfillment of its goals. The trees and vines are bearing fruit, the plants are swelling with vegetables that contain the seeds of the next generation. All are achieving their life’s purpose.
One might even see in the fall foliage, the triumph of the trees. They’ve blossomed and grown leaves, that have absorbed sunshine and carbon to create sap and fruit. To literally create the future. The fruit is mature, and the leaves no longer have to feed it. Doesn’t it seem a little bit like they’re celebrating a job well done?
The kids are all grown, they whisper to one another on voices powered by the breeze. Our work is done! And we’re still here for a while longer with nothing to do but have fun. Let’s get all dressed up and go out in style! Woohoo! ParTAY!
Autumn is like trees' retirement years. The kids are grown, the work is done, time to dress up in bright colors and live life to the fullest.
These thoughts make me smile as I walk and look at the trees. They’re just starting to turn. Just trying out some new styles and colors and getting bolder and braver every day. I imagine them as a bunch of lifelong girlfriends who’ve hung out forever. Lifetime after lifetime, season after season. I wonder, do they remember the summer before after sleeping through winter? Are all those lifetimes memories, or are they held only in the patterns of their inner rings?
I have read that when water evaporates and then falls as snow, its entire memory has been erased. It is as if newborn.
We humans don’t remember from one lifetime to the next, or at least not easily or naturally. (I think we're not meant to. We’re here to experience this lifetime.) But we do remember the years gone by. Trees are only dormant, not dead, between seasons. I wonder.
Don’t you wonder about these things?
I love the taste of the air right now. I think the cold must purify it, because after a brisk, frigid night like last night, the morning air just tastes better, like a crisp apple with a hint of cinnamon, served with a garnish of frosty mist. Chef kiss!
There are some leaves on the ground already, lots of them. I scoop up all I can hold in my hands and bring them to my face and just smell them. My mind fills with memories that match that smell all the way my childhood “back-to-school” vibe.
Everything always felt new in autumn back then, when school was the whole world. New class, new grade, new teacher. I can smell those classrooms right now. The books, the wooden desks, the chalk dust. Yeah, that’s fall as much as those leaves are.
I sit outside for a while to bask in the cool, autumn sun, and vow that I’ll bring my laptop outside and write day’s pages out here. I'm on the second draft of the current novel; the fun part.
None of the above was a ritual in the way we think of rituals. It wasn't, cast a circle, light a candle, visualize, chant. I think the purest ritual to observe the energy shift into autumn is to wallow in it.
The New Mabon Ritual
Step One--and-only: Go outside, and dive into this annual feast of sensory delights!
Feel the cold breeze and the warm sun dueling playfully for your skin.
I will chill her!
No, for I will warm her!
En garde!
Goosebumps rise when the breeze picks up, but then you have to unzip your jacket when it dies down and the sun blazes warm. It's a time of contrasts. Doesn't the cold make you appreciate the warmth more? Isn't the breeze a relief from the sun when it gets too hot?
Feel the natural world shifting with this pull and tug, ebb and flow, cold vs warm, winter vs summer. That's the energy of autumn, the very soul of transition.
Taste the air. Take big open-mouthed breaths and let autumn rinse over your tongue and fill your mouth on the way to your lungs. Breathe it in deep, and let it sweep away all the old stale air leftover from seasons-gone-by in a rushing, chilling, bracing breeze as you exhale. Feel its delicious shiver all the way to your toes. Give a full body sadder and make the universal shuddery sounds when you do. You know what it is. Do that.
It's cleansing. Let it cleanse you. Cleansing is the energy of autumn, and also Transmutation; the art of changing one thing into another thing. The vulture is the queen of transmutation. She can eat enough botulism to wipe out a small human village, but her excrement will be so pure as to be antiseptic. Transmutation is also the energy of autumn. Spinning straw into gold, shit into treasure, hard times into the most valuable experiences.
Smell the autumn. As I pass by the berry bushes where a young doe ate berries right in front of my eyes a month ago, I smell the sharp tang of fermentation, something between wine and vinegar, not unpleasant, but wholly recognizable. Old granny would say the berries were “Workin’.”
Hear the songs of the birds. They’ve changed. The crows and blue jays (corvids, both) are noisier than they’ve been all summer. I always caw as the crows fly over, and say hello. Sometimes, they’ll caw back at me, and one or twice, instead continuing on by, a group of three have circled back and flown around me cawing and I caw back once or twice. And then they go.
The jays just squawk. It’s hard to find anything interesting or pretty about their call. I can’t imitate it, I’ve tried. I have a habit of repeating back every bird call I hear, and I’m pretty good at some of them.
Hear, too, the wind in the trees. Its sound is also different now. Before, the soft, green leaves muffled the wind, baffled it so it was all but silent. But now those very same leaves amplify the sound of the wind more with every passing day, as they dry and change color. They’ll be loudest of all right before they fall, and there must a beautiful message for us in that.
There are beautiful messages everywhere in nature.
Look, as if you could help yourself. Feast your eyes on the brilliant display of nature. There is never so much beauty, I think, as in the fall. The hardwoods, of course, blaze brightest. They provide the vivid neon orange and scarlet red foliage that sometimes seem they've been covered in blacklight paint. (Remember that?) And then there are the poplars, aspen siblings that turn a vivid yellow gold that just about glows. Their leaves are round and they shimmer with every touch of the breeze. They look like the chains of gold coins on a belly dancer’s belt.
Look, too at the vivid blue of the sky. Look at the clouds forming, as mists rise from distant wooded hillsides, if you have that kind of view. Look at whatever nature you can find and see the message. See the lessons in it. Those mists are like souls rising from bodies to rejoin the source and begin again.
It’s all the same. It’s all connected.
And that's the ritual. however, there's a deeper way of observing, which I give you below.
We have reached the harvest time.
This is the second harvest festival. There’s only one to go; Samhain. The cycle we call 2023 is waning. What did we plant and tend to with our time and attention all year? And what is our harvest looking like this time around? Everything coming to us right now is an important message, and a mirror.
Mabon is traditionally a time of giving thanks for the harvest. I want to do more than give thanks. I want to truly appreciate my harvest by examining each part of it, good or bad, in order to fully receive the message that it brings. The message that it is, really.
Something in me must match each part of my harvest or it could not exist. It is natural law. We have to believe in, expect, and/or pay attention to things in order for them to manifest in our lives. Everything is vibration and like attracts like.
So what could the message of our harvest be? The fun part is interpreting the messages for yourself. It’s like a tarot reading, only instead of interpreting cards, you’re interpreting the elements of the life around you, the life you’re living right now in this moment. What’s good? What’s bad? What’s not happening that you wanted to happen? What is happening that you didn’t want to happen?
And then the interpretation, the “reading” you put together for yourself isn’t predicting the future. It’s a report card on how you're doing and how you've done in the seasons gone by. These are the elements that have gathered around me. What are they telling me? Maybe...
Worry about this thing less.
Spend more time on what you love.
Look how nicely that turned out—your fears were unfounded.
You are better than you have allowed yourself to be.
Notice how when you do what your heart wants you to do, it always works out?
Notice how when you try to force something that doesn't feel right, it never works out?
Why are you still struggling against this thing you don’t want? Either make peace with it, or leave it behind.
Any of those or myriad others. It's all what you feel.
This is a time to give thanks for our harvest—all parts of it! The parts we didn’t want teach us far more than the parts we did want. The hard parts feed our growth and expansion like compost feeds the garden. Growth and expansion are the purpose of life itself; experiencing, expanding, growing.
But to truly give thanks, we must first thoroughly know the thing for which we are thankful. That’s appreciation. And this ritual I’ve offered in this long-winded autumnal post, can help us get there.
30 YEARS
I’m wallowing in my harvest, which is particularly sweet this year as I’m celebrating 30 years as a published novelist this month, and 30 years since the birth of my longest running series, Wings in the Night, which is still ongoing today, with the release of its first novel, Twilight Phantasies.
To celebrate, I have three audiobooks at half-price, an award-winning thriller for 99¢, the first 3 full length novels of Wings in the Night in an anniversary bundle for just 2.99, and 4-complete Witchy novellas in another specially priced bundle, Witchery, going on sale 9/26 for 2.99.
I'm also giving away a prize package worth about $150
Here's a link to the latest Maggie Shayne newsletter's online edition all the details on all of the above.