Autumn Equinox
Reflection
The autumn equinox arrives on Saturday, September 23, 2023, at 2:49 A.M.
There is poignancy to autumn. This is the time of harvest. The plants have achieved their fullness and now they offer their fruits and drop their seeds. The trees, whose new green announced springtime, will lose their green and reveal the brilliant oranges, reds and yellows that were hidden beneath. The early dawn of mornings and the long brightness of evenings have slowly shortened into a balance of light and darkness. We know darkness will grow before light slowly increases. As we see the trees burst into color and then slowly drop their leaves, we ask ourselves what we have become and what we have to give. There is a ripeness, a fullness and a freedom to reveal what has been accomplished. We are in rhythm with earth. This is also our time of transition rooted in the balance of what has been, open to what can change.
Prayer
O Creator, whose spirit fills the universe, help us to recognize our planetary oneness, our solidarity with all species of our world, our unity with you and each other.
Action
Live life simply and in tune with earth’s seasons and hold all earth’s creatures in respect and appreciation. Hold the rhythms of life as sacred each filled with its own potential and gifts. Let go and release things that have been a burden.
Suggested Reading
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-22
Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.
Hosea 10:12
For me, my God and my joy and all achievement, the very purpose of my being and all my love of life, all depend on this one basic vision of the union between yourself and the universe. Let others fulfilling a function more august than mine, proclaim your splendors as pure Spirit; as for me, dominated as I am by a vocation which springs from the inmost fibers of my being, I have no desire, I have no ability, to proclaim anything except the innumerable prolongations of your incarnate being in the world of matter.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to the Universe
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler
I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.
Robert Browning
Things fall apart so that other things can fall together.
Bill Smith
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.
Walter Scott
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.
John Donne
Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
Hal Borland
The season for enjoying the fullness of life — partaking of the harvest, sharing the harvest with others, and reinvesting and saving portions of the harvest for yet another season of growth.
Denis Waitley
Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant
Note
During the equinox, the Sun crosses what we call the “celestial equator”—an imaginary extension of Earth’s equator line into space. The equinox occurs precisely when the Sun’s center passes through this line. When the Sun crosses the equator from north to south, this marks the autumnal equinox; when it crosses from south to north, this marks the vernal equinox.