The billboard sign flashed by on the highway almost before I could read it. "Festival of the Turning Leaves" - a quaint, albeit descriptive, name. Somewhere close by a harvest festival was in the planning. Some leaves are already turning and the summer wears thin. A beautiful as the days have been, as endless the skies, time is catching up.
The Celtic autumn arrived on August 1. The vernal equinox on September 22 at 8:46 AM, PDT ushers in the midpoint between autumn and winter's start on November 1.
On a morning not so long ago I stood in a breeze that swept between spring and summer and marveled amidst hundreds of swirling maple and ash seeds as they dashed by and beyond me.
The seeds that flew by me were so uncontained. Anyone watching would have been struck by the random motion of the seeds, so much like the seeming random events in our lives. But those maple seeds did not dance for nothing, the ash seeds did not cloud the wind for show. They, like us, are purposeful in their rotation, even if their full trajectory is unseen. Their best attempts, like so many of ours, are in pursuit of good ground.
It is fruitful, sometimes, to consider where the seeds of our own lives were released, where they traveled and where they grew up. Where did you come from? How is that place now? Was the ground you found to put down roots more fertile than the place you left?
Seeds appear to fly without a frame, without structure. But they are held to their course, as are we, by their own internal purpose. They skirt this world and that, the past and the present, the spring and the autumn. This year's seeds, next year's trees - rising in my mind the same way the autumnal leaves now fly and scatter before me. A festival of turning leaves also turns memories of seasons passed.
With the equinox comes balance. The sun illuminates half the earth, from pole to pole with neither extremity tilted toward the sun. In those rare moments of illuminated balance, sometimes we can remember the seeds, sometimes we see only the trees. If we might, just for a moment, hold the image of both, we might find the unique dance of life that is ours alone. Celebration of the equinox is a reverie to what is, what was, and what will always be between - may the autumn breezes blow kindly on us all.