Autumn: Trusting the Process
I am really loving autumn this year, maybe it is because we have had an actual summer here in the UK, with heat and sun and everything! But seriously I am really enjoying watching the season grow and change, especially the colours and the quality of light. It seems sometimes that we need to experience one extreme to appreciate the change.
It has got me thinking about all that we acknowledge and celebrate at this time of year. The long warm hazy days are replaced by the crisp, shorter days, darkness creeps into the gaps that the summer left behind and we start to wrap up, warm up and cuddle up.
What we are witnessing around us is an ending. A beautiful ending, but the beginning of the end of the calendar year. What offered so much promise in spring has well and truly delivered on all its promises and is now beginning to die back, to withdraw, to return to where it came from. Of course, it does this majestically and in a beautiful array of colour and light and sound and feeling that wakes us all up from our summer slumber and reminds us of our own humanity and place in this world.
As I get older I am noticing so much more about what the world around me can teach me about my own journey through this time. The things I am learning now about the ebb and flow of life are often playing out right outside my window. In fact, they have been hiding in plain sight all this time. Nature’s ubiquitous cycle of birth, life and death continues regardless, slowly but firmly marking the changes, following its own rituals in order for this continuous life cycle to play out year after year.
Today I am watching the apples and the leaves fall off the trees in my garden. We only moved into our house last Christmas, so we have never experienced autumn here before. When we moved in, we were excited to find out what was in our garden; what was poised underground ready to grow. We were unsure of what the fruit trees were and talked of possible pear crumbles and apple pies in the late summer. Now the last of the apples hang heavily on the boughs and the leaves are gathering in corners and nooks of the garden. They are returning to the earth. It is the beginning of their end. We put on our wellies and place the windfalls and the leaves in the compost, the magical cauldron in the corner of the garden, where these last gifts of nature go to make magic, to die back completely, to lose their form and flavour and all recognisable qualities and in doing so are transformed into fresh earth that will feed next year’s crop of garden jewels. Nature does not mourn its endings, it celebrates them, it lights up the sky and the ground in reds and yellows and golds as a sign of their glory and then it slowly pulls the goodness back in and transforms the old into new to nourish the seasons to come.
As humans we struggle with change. We struggle with seasons in our own lives, with the life-death-life cycles that we can be experiencing on a daily basis. We may be drawn to the thrill of seeing new things grow, or the safety that comes when times are good and the days are long. We often struggle though when things in our life may start to fall away and change. We can be resistant to this falling away and changing, we like it like this, why must it change? Change can cause us to feel uncomfortable, unsure, nervous and sometimes out of our depth. However, the answer is right outside our window. Nothing stays the same, everything comes and goes. What has come before feeds into what will come next and from year to year the tree will grow the same shaped leaves and apples, but they are different and new ones. Nature does not resist change, or fear the falling away of what is there, it celebrates it, it goes back to the earth. And we can do this too, we can use this time to remember to come back to ourselves, to look inward, to embrace the discomfort of change as our lives develop and meander, because nothing stays the same and often our resistance to change is what makes the change painful, not the change itself. Nature trusts its own process and as result makes rich and nutritious soil for all that comes next and it does it in a wonderful blaze of glory
How can we take all that is falling away in our own lives, celebrate all that it has been and then use it to make the future even more incredible?