Autumn

The Sun's perennial journey across the sky has once again reached a mark of change: a human observance of the passing of what was into what is becoming. Summer, long in descent from it's zenith, has now gone from us. Signs of her presence are slowly withering from the limbs of trees. Herbaceous plants of the forest floor return to roots to dream within the womb of the cold earth. The breath of Boreas carries away the winged ones, and the songs of many are no longer heard in these forests. Only a stillness lays over the lakes that once echoed with the haunting cries of the loon. The fading calls of geese in their great formations and the undulating waves of starlings in the thousands remind us that the tide of life must, by it's nature, ultimately recede and pass onto spheres beyond that which it once knew.

And that time will come, only not yet. Though Persephone now passes into the deepest hollows of the earth, carrying with her the vibrance and joy of summer, there is much here still, and new energies and orientations grip us and our kindred. We hear the snorts of great bucks, and see the signs of their virility on ravaged trunks, an omen that life still thunders and thrives. The antlers of bull moose reach their potential and inspire with their nobility and strength. Ravens everhaunt the paths of the wolves, their breeding and denning season now passed, soon to begin long treks of the hunt. Fields and gardens bear their fruits, and the trees and shrubs of the forest offer their own gifts to warm our bodies before the coming cold. Cranberries, apples, hawthorns, and grapes wait for searching hands, claws, and jaws. The seedheads of leeks lead us to hidden sustenance. Cattails still stand sturdily in the cold winds, and wild rice hangs heavy over solemn lakes. Our feelings of loss and mourning are overcome by a swelling in our chests at the strange beauty of this new time of harvest, and we are moved to joyous celebration, not only for what has passed, but for the space and time we now find ourselves in, and for the mysterious coming journey into the night, with the hint of a distant morning to follow.

It is with this deep sense of celebration that I begin this work at the equinox. I have held the desire to create and grow such a thing since the past midsummer. Like all ambitions, it began as a spark: without substance, and likely to pass quickly out of time, as are most things so bright and small. This spark would not meet that fate. I felt that it was one that I must tend. It would become a small coal, dark cedar dust animated into life by heat and oxygen. Such a thing must be carefully handled. It could be scattered in the slightest wind, drowned by a single drop of water, lost with the slightest carelessness. Over the cycles of the moon and descension of the sun I have held this coal gingerly to my chest, nestled in a bed of cedar bark and dried leaves, wrapped in a strip of proud white birch bark, waiting for its time.

Now with cutting winds beginning to sting my eyes and autumn rains chilling my bones, it is time to grow this coal into it's potential. Standing beneath noble firs burning in purest gold in the final rays of sunset, with a hearth of dried hemlock and spruce twigs awaiting it's fiery apotheosis at my feet, piles of assorted sticks at my left, great maple logs to my right, and an offering of sacred cedar fronds bound with with their own bark, I lift the kindling housing this coal, and with rapt joy, begin to breathe the fire into life.