Fall just as it is

This seems like the first time I have fully embraced the fall season. This probably isn't entirely true, but it certainly feels that way. This year I have really noticed the calm feeling of the season.. everything is dampening down and getting ready for hibernation. There is also the other side of fall -- working to conserve the garden harvest, getting back into the flurry of school and work. The animals are taking a last run at life.. lots of angry, lumbering wasps around, and in the mountains some hiking trails are closed as bears scrounge for the last bit of fruit before the big freeze. The trees along the Bow River are particularly beautiful right now.. the aspens are turning bright yellow.

Cheryl at Backseat Gourmet wrote about the fact that when you are connected to a CSA farm, you start to get annoyed at all the talk of sunny 'good weather' and rainy 'bad weather', when your dinner is dependent on a fair balance of the two. I think the same is true of the seasons, especially for gardeners -- in Calgary fall means the end of fresh food and days in the sun, shorter days and colder nights. So summer is 'good' and winter is 'bad'.

I've been reading Rudolf Steiner's reflections on the seasons. Of fall, he writes:

If we are to participate in this waning of nature, just as we do in nature's growing time, we must learn to experience the dying away of nature in our most inner being. For is a person becomes more sensitive to the secret workings of nature, and thus participates actively in nature's germinating and fruiting, it follows that he [sic] will also livingly experience the effects of autumn on the outer world. ... When the events of autumn and winter draw on, he certainly must enter sensitively into the processes of fading and dying. But he must not, as he does in summer, give himself over to nature-consciousness. On the contrary, he must then devote himself to self-consciousness. In the time when external nature is dying, he must oppose nature-consciousness with the force of self-consciousness.

So autumn has its own purpose; it can be a time to turn inward and to see what's hiding in the inner garden.