Autumn invites us to reflect and detach

Autumn begins. The last fruits ripen and the first leaves fall. If spring is a time of renewal and summer of plenitude, autumn is a time of maturation and culmination, of releasing and sowing the seeds of what will bear fruit next year. A station for reflection and intuition.

Emotions in tune with nature

In today’s world, especially in cities, the rush and technology sometimes make us forget where we are in the annual cycle. However, to open ourselves to the harmony of the world it is essential to connect with the rhythms of nature.; perceive the changes and cycles, in the macrocosm and in the microcosm of our interior; feel how the passing of days and nights and seasons are manifested.

The metamorphosis of the world changes us too. With the passing of the seasons, not only does the nature that surrounds us change, our existence is also transformed, tuning in with new rhythms of light and darkness, of heat and cold, changes in humidity and in the winds that renew the air, changes of activity in the cycles of water, flora, fauna and skies.

Within the annual cycle, autumn corresponds to sunset in the day and the culmination of maturity in life. It is time of culmination and decline.

Gone is the playful parenthesis of summer and the course begins again, life. The passage of summer has dried up the air and, for this reason, in autumn we enjoy especially clear skies, day and night. The spring light is young and restless. Autumn’s is wise and mature.

Friedrich Nietzsche alludes to this while living in Italy, at a latitude like ours, dreaming of music that is “jovial and deep as noon in October”.

Moments to internalize and let go

In Chinese philosophy, autumn is a yin season, tending towards receptiveness, intuition and interiorization.. Tree sap is withdrawn from the leaves and branches and returned to the roots. Animals decrease their activity. It gets dark earlier and earlier and little by little the cold returns.

Autumn is traditionally associated with melancholy, we withdraw from the outside world, physically and psychologically, and we turn inward. We spend less time outdoors and we are more at home, dedicated to activities that are less energetic than those of summer: we read, talk and we can once again enjoy the fire at home.

The sunsets are longer than in summer. That is why autumn gives us a festival of reddish skies, a reflection of the warm tones that first cover the leaves of the trees and then the soil, to become fertile humus from which life will sprout again.

Autumn is the season in which it rains the most in our climate. With the rain, new aromas emanate from the earth and a smell of fullness permeates the forest. The leaves and flowers decay, but the fruits abound. The prized mushrooms sprout, acorns, walnuts, hazelnuts, carob and chestnuts ripen.

A time of death and rebirth

In the middle of autumn the castanyada is celebrated in Catalonia, in Galicia the magosto, in the Gaelic culture samhain and in the Anglo-Saxon countries Halloween. At the origin of these festivities there are rites related to death and rebirthmore explicit in the famous Mexican Day of the Dead.

According to the Buddha, “our existence is as transitory as the autumn clouds”. Freeing ourselves from greed and the desires that shackle us is one of the key recommendations of Buddhism. The Buddha says in the Dhammapada: “Pluck off your greed as you would pluck an autumn lily.”

In autumn, nature practices detachment and gets rid of what is not essential.

It is up to us to let go of what we no longer need, detach ourselves from the ways of being that no longer bear fruit, find a place of inner calm and prepare to start anew.

We can let go of wilted relationshipssaying goodbye genuinely, with gratitude and responsibility.

the meaning of autumn

The leaves fall quietly and sweetly offering a spectacle in Europe, East Asia and Eastern North America. The green of summer turns into red, gold, yellow, warm light on the cooling earth.

In Lithuanian, the current language closest to the ancient Indo-European languages, the name of the season, ruduo, evokes the reddish and brown color that the leaves acquire. In North American English, the fall of the leaves gives its name to autumn: the fall (“the fall”). No doubt the early British settlers must have marveled at the autumn deciduous forests of New England.

In other European languages, the name of autumn evokes what the season has as last, final and late. Thus, in Basque, autumn is udazken (from azken, “last, final”), in Asturian it is seronda (from the Latin serotinus, “late”) and in Catalan it is tardor (from the Latin tardationis). In Aragonese it is called agüerro (derived from the Basque agor, “exhausted”, like the land that no longer bears fruit).

The poet Juan Ramón Jiménez personifies the season: “Autumn, young Andalusian with burning eyes and golden hair, / all dressed in mauve brocade, with amaranth leaves in his hands”. The poet evokes the reddish color of amaranth in the leaves, a plant whose name means “that does not wither” in Greek.

Autumn is also associated with decay and decline. We see it in the title of a famous novel by Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and in that of a classic of cultural history, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, by the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga, also known for showing how the game it is an essential aspect of culture.

Autumn is decline, but that decline prepares renewal, just as the autumn of the Middle Ages led to the Renaissance.

autumn in the world

It is now nine years since the world declared itself in “crisis”. There were other crises long before, in multiple areas. The ecological crisis, for example. But the world was supposed to be fine. Until the collapse of the real estate and speculative bubble, in the fall of 2008, meant the fall of the global economy.

The systemic crisis in which we live is like autumn of many withered structures with which we had tried to take over the world. Its branches will fall. Some will make noise. But it is also a time when new spaces and new possibilities open up.

The seeds of a wiser, more ecological and conscious society are beginning to be sown.e that begins to question what the representatives of an out-of-date world say. Our future will depend on whether greed or lucidity triumphs.

How to live this season?

As the Sufi tradition formulates: “If we cannot read in nature, or read existence, then what can we understand or accept? (…) what must be acquired is the ability to recognize signs. This is the highest science.”

This is the time to follow your own criteria, to trust your intuitions and the signs you see around you, in nature.

May autumn help you let go of what no longer serves youto strengthen your interior and prepare to be reborn in a transformed world.