Loading ...Today is the first day of autumn. It is also the autumn equinox, the date wherein day and night are equal in length. The next equinox we will see will be March 21st, or as the Neocrats refer to it, New Year’s Day! And thus we are now exactly halfway through the current year.
When autumn comes there is much reason to fret. For the next three months the nights will get longer and longer; the sun will rise less and less high; the days will get gradually darker and colder; the foliage will flake away from the trees and ground turn to decomposing mulch; the long night of November will follow; the world will turn silent and the ground will freeze.
In many ways the approach of autumn is the saddest time of year. The decaying, withering leaves reminds us of the approach of old age. The great big times that were high spring and summer are now replaced by a seasonal tiredness. I write this just after waking up, and under a dark sky which is under the tail end of a hurricane.
But there are also postive things about this season. For instance, the pagan festival of Samhain (Hallowe’en to those in England and America) is fast approaching. This is the time of apple dunking and apple dumpling and the bonfires. In a previous post I mentioned my own pagan efforts in incantation during this very festival. The leaves produce a dance of colour. (In Japan, visits to autumn gardens are a cultural pastime.) The woodlands produce their characteristic scent which seem to catch the mystery of Samhain; the brent geese (all of them, the entire species!) comes to Strangford Lough; you can get virtuoso pies in the Bay Tree. And after you pass through the dark months, you come to the Midwinter Festival (to those in England and America we call this Christmas) and the hour of return light. This is the time of icicles and illumination. (Last year all I can remember of this period is candlelight, myrrh, and J.S. Bach.)
Another thing to remember about autumn is that in Vedic culture the falling away of the plenitudes of summer is considered a symbol for the falling away of the believer’s earthly attachments as s/he makes progress towards Samadhi.
And in the Fire Tablet, one of the treasured Baha’i Scriptures, we read the following:
“Were it not for the cold, how would the heat of Thy words prevail, O Expounder of the worlds?
Were it not for calamity, how would the sun of Thy patience shine, O Light of the worlds?”
Bookmark: 
being the first to comment is like being the first at a banquet table, but Sarmad, I want to say how much I love the way you weave these wonderful images together and create a lavish feast of words and ideas …
as a Bahai, I can see that there are cycles and the worlds affairs also go through seasons. I actually read the Fire Tablet the other day, in light of recent events, which really touched me, but it’s still hard to believe or explain that the ‘old world’ is like a chimera (a grotesque monster having disparate parts ) somthing horrible, but that the new world which will come, which we are working towards is not chimerical (wildly fanciful; highly unrealistic).
at the same time, I am so very glad that Autumn for you means Spring in the Southern latitudes!