I’ll be honest:  sometimes, I’m just not that spiritual.  In fact, I might venture to say that a good bit of the time, I’m so busy doing things like cleaning toilets, buying groceries, editing pictures, doing the whole “life as a work at home and occasionally outside the home, sometimes in a professional setting” thing that my spiritual side just sort of disappears into an occasional prayer or lit candle when a friend is in need.  This is especially true in the Spring and Summer.  We’re busy with the end of school and with vacation and visiting and then stupefied with the heat.  You would think that gardening would give me a “tied to Mother Earth and all of her abundance” vibe, but really, it’s more about getting the stuff in the ground so we can eat it. 

Autumn changes that.  The kids are back in school and I can get more time to myself.  Life slows down, even just a little bit.  And I can take a moment to pause and reflect on what IT all means.

Folks get all gaga about Spring:  the flowers, the births, the pollen, and bees, and the warmth.  We’re dizzy and excited with LIFE, eager to get out in the sun and feel the light on our faces.  Autumn is not about that.  Autumn is about…well, it’s about things dying, really.

But WHAT a death!  What a glorious, rich, sensuous slide into cold and dark.  The air is spicy with harvested pumpkins being baked into pies and peanuts and pig being boiled and barbecued for weekend fun..  The beautyberry glows like amethysts from the roadsides before becoming breakfast for migrating birds.  The leaves flame up their own funeral pyres.  The light is a golden blanket you wrap around yourself against the chill.

You know what’s coming:  the cold of winter, the blankness of sky and tree and ground.  And so you savor what is left to you.  And you marvel that you are gifted with such beauty and bounty.

That’s one of the reasons why I reconnect with my spirituality during the Autumn.  Because even more than the nutty aliveness of Spring, the Autumn teaches me about what it is to live—and to remember that life is transient and precious.  It reminds me that others have left this world before me and that they are just past my reach, close by and present.  It connects me to the idea that we must store up our treasures and prepare for having less. 

There’s also the idea of balance that comes with the equinox (and yes, I understand that it comes a week before October…work with me here.)  There is a time when we aren’t rushing toward dark or light:  we can just be still.  In between cold and heat, in between life and death, just…still and able to think of where you are in that place and what you need to move on to the next place.  I find it a comforting place to rest.

Of course, there’s college football…

What?

Y’all, I AM a Georgia Bulldog.  It’s pretty much a religion around here, with Vince Dooley being the patron saint and Mark Richt being the current prophet.  (Or demon, depending on the Tennessee score…)

The point of all this is that Autumn, and especially October, makes me think about the bigger picture and the smaller one at the same time.  It’s the time of year when I feel most whole and when I feel that anything is possible because almost everything has happened over the course of the year.