As we cross the threshold into Autumn, nature offers us her ancient teaching: the leaves blaze and then release, the air cools, and something in us too begins to loosen its grip.
We may sense a quiet surrender inside, as though certain inner companions, once so close, cannot journey with us into what is next. This shedding can feel like a relief, but it can also stir a trembling, the rawness of groundlessness.In the language of alchemy, this is not the yellowing but the season of smoke and ember - a stage where the vessel warms, the old form dissolves, and unseen elements are released into the air. It is a process of transmutation, not failure.
Autumn has always felt like the most tender season for me, as if a door opens into the deeper strata of grief and longing. The landscape of soul takes on a hue of blue-grey, carrying not just sadness for what is lost, but an aching fullness, a heart heavy with beauty too vast to hold.
This is not the flat sadness of something missing, but a saturation of feeling - a melancholy that ripens rather than withers. It is the soul’s way of reminding us that aliveness and sorrow are woven of the same threads.
Around us, the world mirrors this truth: the scarlet maple, the gold ash, the damp moss and wood darkening with rain. Each image is both a dying and a becoming, an invitation to bow to the mystery.
When we allow our inner sight to polish itself in this season, the outlines of who we thought we were begin to blur. The “solid” arrangements of relationship, work, health, and meaning may not appear so certain. This is the soul’s composting, the scattering of the old into fertile ground.
It is natural to resist, to want the familiar to endure. But perhaps what is falling away is making space for something unimagined, some form of life and love not yet visible.
In these passages we are asked to be faithful to grief, to stay present with what ends, and to receive the wisdom carried by the broken pieces. Birth and rebirth are never tidy; they are both wondrous and bewildering, filled with contradiction.
And yet, even in the disorientation, this too is love - the wild, reorganizing current of love that holds both what we gain and what we lose, what delights and what dissolves.
An invitationIf you’d like, take a few quiet moments this week to step outside with the leaves. Hold one in your hand. Feel its texture, its fragility. As you breathe, ask yourself gently: What is ready to be released in me? What longs to return to the soil, to become nourishment for what is to come?
Notice what arises in your body, without rushing to answer. Let the season speak to you.
