When the Light Wanes, What Happens to You?
Here we are, in the weeks after the fall equinox. From here on, the nights grow longer than the days.
You have your own feelings about the seasonal change, I'm sure. The angle of the sun shifts, the temperature drops, and our activities change along with them. Children, and some adults, are back in school. Halloween decorations have already appeared in store aisles, and even in some yards. The garden that was so green and lush is starting to yellow and look a little ragged around the edges.
To be nature-connected means to be open and aware of the effects of the season: how the change affects your moods and how you spend your time, and how your inner experience is mirrored in the natural world, and vice versa.
You also have a personal history with this time of year. Maybe you have memories of harvest festivals, or of going back to a classroom as a student or teacher.
I have many associations with fall. A couple of weeks ago I stayed out at the coast, and on a hike I was captivated by the mushrooms pushing their way up through the soil, glistening after rain the previous night. I will always be grateful to my first husband for showing me how to notice fungi. (He grew up next to the fish hatchery his dad managed in Forks, Washington, which is a very soggy place!)
I met my current husband in September 17 years ago, and on our first real date I took him out to forage for chanterelles.
When I lived on the coast for a couple of years, fall was when the tourists left, and the ocean swell got bigger and cleaner for surfing, which was both exciting and scary.
But my father also died tragically at the beginning of October 30 years ago, which put me on a new timeline of depression and pot addiction. (That timeline eventually took me from couch surfing in Seattle to a ski resort, where one blue-sky day on the mountain, I jumped timelines again.)
If I marked my autumns over the years in emotional tones (amazement, wonder, gratitude, grief), they would make every color of the rainbow.
Last spring I took a class series about nature and mental health from Aimee Frazier, a local trauma therapist who works with her clients outdoors. She told us it's important to know our own personal history with the seasons, so we're aware of what we're heading into and can resource ourselves. Sometimes we forget what our unconscious remembers, and we feel sad or anxious without knowing where it comes from. But when we know and can plan for it, it doesn't surprise us and knock us out of equilibrium. Instead, we can honor our history and give ourselves tender care.
If you're a goal- or growth-oriented person, this awareness helps too. It doesn't mean you can't still make progress or show up for whatever you're working on. It means that maybe one night, instead of watching TV, you walk outside, find the moon, and offer up a prayer. Or you dedicate a special hike to a memory, or to remind yourself of your own resilience. Or you watch the geese fly south, the way they have for thousands of years, and remember how big and old the Earth is and how it can hold you and your feelings, too.
This is what I mean by Sobernatural, a term that came to me as I was falling asleep a couple of months ago. Instead of numbing a feeling or "smoothing it over" by drinking or getting high, you live on the land of your own experience: paying attention to the gathering clouds, finding or making shelter, drawing your loved ones near, or enjoying your solitude while you commune with what it means to be alive.
Over the next couple of weeks, maybe you'll give something like this a try:
Put on a fall playlist. Light a candle and pour a warm drink.
Then free-associate in your journal or notebook, using colors, shapes, lines, and words, and see what comes to you about the season of fall. It's a way to get to know yourself better, which is always a good thing.
If you try it, let me know how it goes.