The autumn equinox is upon us and ah, yes! As the poet Rilke reminds us in his poem “Autumn Day,” “it is time. The summer was immense.” Maybe not immense enough for those of us who see so little of the sun in the other three seasons, but I enjoyed my days in it, nevertheless.

And so, as the gods of seasons set about changing the guards and preparing their pageantries, I, too, get busy harvesting the fruits from as I prepare to step into my 222^nd season on earth. I want to think I’ve learned a thing or two about changing seasons. That I’ve become more resilient. But, in truth, I’m more prone now than ever to shivering when the breeze lifts the leaves from the trees and discards them upon the ground.

And yet I’m apprenticing myself to becoming more mindful about how that I must become craftier about reaping the bounty that overflows in the garden of my life. I’ve gotten into the habit of training my eye to lack rather than abundance, and to depletion at the expense of seeing all that is rebirthing and perennial and renewable.

It’s been easy, too easy, to be drawn into the vortex of inventorying my losses or as theologian John Yungblut names them – my diminishments. As an Episcopalian priest turned Quaker who journeyed with Parkinson’s Disease and later cancer before his death in 1995, John grappled with the question of how one can hallow or make holy one’s diminishments.

The fine art of hallowing is about consecrating or venerating. But how do we begin to do so when all we want to do is lament what we’ve lost and bemoan how hollowed out we feel? We want that thing back – be it a person, relationship, livelihood and financial stability, beauty, good health, youth, strength, longevity, home…the list is endless.

Bounty Hunting.

The first step begins by taking stock of the immensity, as Rilke’s poem hints. Name and claim the bounty you’ve held – be it this season or even throughout your life. Harvest the goodness and behold the riches, and yes, dare to cultivate an attitude of gratitude about each precious thing. You got to have and to hold these diminishments, hallowed by whatever name you give them.

Lost and Found.

And then, as you bask in the rare privilege of what it has meant to carry these experiences and live this one particular life of yours, and allow yourself to feel awe and humility, allow yourself to remember the fleeting nature of all things. This notion of non-attachment is somewhat easier you’re a Buddhist but a bit trickier if, like me, you tend to cling to things long past their due date.

Grief guru Francis Weller, in his book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, identifies the first of five gates of grief as “All that we love we will lose.” We know this, of course, but sometimes we need to be reminded that this, too, is our essential work in the world, which Mary Oliver so gorgeously reminds us with these words of imperative:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”
from “In Blackwater Woods”

On a side note, I feel so inspired by fellow celebrant and thanadoula Barb Phillips’ birthday ritual this year, which happened to coincide as a kind of autumnal offering. She always sets a gorgeous seasonal altar and often creates an earth altar, or in this case, a Ring Ritual in the forest that she says, “marked relationships with my body, my healing, my ancestors, my home and land, my food and what feeds me, my family, my friends, my community, my wisdom and the unknown over the past decade and beyond and recommitting to those relationships.”

Letting go varies depending on the thing itself, but this season, I’m re-tooling an old ritual I named Sticks & Stones. If that has you thinking of the old nursery rhyme, so much the better because I did originally conceive of it with hurt in mind.

For my own reconsecration rite during my time away in nature this next week, I’m going to find some medium-sized stones of varying sizes, (enough to make a small encircling with), and I shall name the losses with a Sharpie marker. Some losses feel larger than others, hence the different sized stones. I’ll then spend some time journaling this grief as a way to make sense of this sorrow. Is this the dream of something? Was it a core aspect of my identity? Is it something that can never be salvaged? Or do I need to let go of some unrealistic expectation about this particular loss in order for something new to be born from it?

On the sticks I gather, I’ll be writing the qualities, gifts, and teachings that these hallowed diminishments have gifted me. Already, I know these to be humility, vulnerability, caring, courage, pause, regeneration, kindness, acceptance, resilience, and grace. I’ll then be burning these writings of grief and gratitude, together with these stalwart sticks as my way to usher in this new season with a new spaciousness, new ground, and a heightened sense of my intention to lean into life more wholeheartedly.

My last little bit of offering will be to place a bundle at the center of the fire and dancing flames that honors my contributions this past season, in order to take in the beauty of the giving. And so that I might set down some of those old ways of being and doing that are no longer generative and welcome more emergent strategies, as seer/sayer adrienne maree brown names them.

Release. Renew. Repeat.

Equinox } by Richard Wehrman

The Garden releases its last
radiance, not as something failed,
but as its full reason for being: to give
continually, to its last bit of energetic being.
Its giving is its beauty. It is a smile,
it is the heart of love.

So the birdsong that surrounds me
is given, not away, but into the world.
It is given as rain, as sunlight, as snowfall
and autumn leaves. It falls on our ears
as what it is, with no deception,
the complete truth of being.

Even the smell of decay, drifting from
the deer, dead by the side of the road, says:
“This is what I am and no other. I do not
pretend to be. Even in death I speak
without deceit, even unto my flesh,
my very bones.”

Be tolerant of these songs,
my musings on the way these things are
For I cannot give up this Summer except by
giving myself as well, fully and completely,
into the praise of our mutual beauty,
our total loving of the World.