Autumn Descent

Seduced by Autumn’s pull toward transience, her promise of change, I am becoming more present to her fleeting medicine. Taking rest in her shadows, awaiting the refuge and comfort that come with the approaching primordial dark. The siren call of liberation echoes through the forest as it dies its little death. 

I feel the fingers of this season open a window in my mind, creating a portal to the inner world, the realm of soul and earth, the chthonic place of death and rebirth, the unknown places of surrender. The liminal in-between, a macrocosm of the microcosmic shift in the soul's natural, spiraling path. I feel the slow, creeping, invitation from the misty fields to practice the process of retrieving a more subtle quality of perception, asking me to get closer to the questions and cast off any certain answers. 

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives” - ursula K. Le Guin

The living world offers us deep reflective medicine during this time of thinning, if only we are willing. I don’t mean living simply by a state of having life, but an animated, more-than-human world that is full of living presence, each being and landscape with their own wisdom and agency, endowed with sentience and purpose. A world in which rivers, stones, plants, animals, weather, and places are not merely the backdrop against which human life unfolds, but participants in the ongoing story of creation. 

In stories from across time and culture, Rivers are known as healers. Mountains remember. Trees are wise elders. Animals move between worlds. A person becomes an animal. Stones speak. The wind knows the way when we are lost. The landscape is not simply where the story happens; it is an embodied being in the story itself. 

In all areas of my personal study and practice, I court ways of thinking and being that challenge the separation between human beings and everything we have come to call “nature.” This Animist, Mythoerotic lens, asks us to recognise the Holy and the Wild, and to reconsider ourselves as participants within the tangled web, rather than seeing Nature as a collection of resources and utility. 

When we orient to Nature as kin, when we extend honor to the worth, autonomy, and wisdom of the world around us, and take on the posture of recognition that we are not separate from her, our awareness grows in ever widening circles that we are not as alone as we think. 

This season becomes not simply a prelude to the dreaded cold and dark of winter, but indeed an ancient and sacred threshold of transformation. A rite of passage into the rich interiority of cosmic consciousness. As blood red leaves float down to the soil on a breeze, we realize that our solitary story is just one thread in the tapestry woven by the dream of the earth.

I have had to reclaim this ancient wisdom from the clutches of a culture that tries to manage, dominate, exile, and control the natural world. Autumn asks us to pay attention in a different way than the vibrant jubilee of summer and spring. She is the harbinger of the other half of the spectrum, the part that grows increasingly uneasy in the hearts and minds of modern society. 

Through the practice of a day-long wilderness vigil, I avail myself to the place I am in, and wander the wild edge where light and dark meet. This ancient practice of sitting and listening to the wild ones teaches me to see with keen animal eyes, listen with tufted ears, and feel the swish of my tail as the conversation unfolds between my soul and from where it came. 

Learning to see in a new way is a taste of the medicine I offer. It’s about sinking into a quality of perception that sees beneath the surface of things, and helps navigate in the deep, Neptunian groundwaters of the soul. That wanders into the dark, misty forest, and regrows the parts of ourselves that have been lost in all our trials and tribulations. That sings over the bones of what was buried, rejected, or fragmented, and reanimates them into a fleshy fullness that is seen, valued, and whole once again. 

It is about decolonizing the imagination, and reclaiming buried capacities for wonder, meaning making, complexity, and visioning. It is about beholding the world with clear eyes and a tender heart. It is about allowing the harvest of dream seeds to take root in the garden of the body, and endeavor to become a trustworthy vessel for incubation. 

This season makes porous the gates between worlds. Whether through sitting with a psychedelic medicine, or exploring inner and outer landscapes through somatic therapies and nature based cosmic and mythic inquiry, we are invited to navigate the mysterious depths of our own true nature. We are guided and supported on this quest by generative forces seen and unseen as we discover a more meaningful world and our unique place within it.