My husband and I have a joke. Around the turn of every season, he’ll come in from a walk or tending to the chickens and declare with a grin: “Last hot day!,” “Last cold day!” We chuckle skeptically, conscious that we’ve never been right about the weather: the exchange goes on for a few more days until we’ve forgotten about trying to determine the coming season’s arrival. It comes all the same.
The seasons fade and rise into each other, but we time-bound people, often attached to beginnings and ends, want a hard start, a hard stop. Even the almanac suggests that with the twenty-first of March, June, September, and December—ta-da—a new season struts confidently into town. Or, if you’re a reader of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, it may be waiting around the next corner. We are told by the stores, always several weeks or months ahead, that it is time to shift.
I am particularly sensitive to this as Michigan, where I live, begins to take on the feel of fall while still most things look like summer: the garden, a little mangy, but still fruitful; our flowers blooming; grass thick; leaves mostly green. The light looks slightly changed only, and mornings are chilly, but this is summer’s quiet leave taking.
Although there is that bite of the new, it’s not quite fall—neither according to the almanac nor to the outdoors. And no matter where you live, whether the seasonal changes are subtle or pronounced, we needn’t rush.
Instead, I am taking a cue from the nature studies my children and I have started. Using The Handbook of Nature Study, an old, clever book, we go out for a short walk around our property in the morning, grab a few natural things like leaves or pine boughs or acorns, or simply take note of what we see, then look at them closely inside (or recall), talking about them, drawing or painting them, and refer to Anna Botsford Comstock’s hefty tome. All throughout the work are encouragements to acknowledge the wonder of things: a tree’s root system as a mirror to its head of branches, the miraculous journey of water through sun and air, the funny way a bee’s face resembles that of a puppy with long downward ears. We will soon look at the way a leaf’s green pulls gently back.
If you want to live seasonally, to live liturgically, if you will, this is the way to do it. We are better off in a mode of receiving reality, even having to catch up to it just a bit, than of grabbing on, pressuring it. Seasons and environments are given to us, like all things, so that we can learn from them.
As this new portion of the year unfolds, let’s begin our interior work outside. Fall looks differently around our country and the world. Look for the signs of it where you live.
I am reminded, too, of the spirit of Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: Our work is not to come up with ideas but to put them down, to live in such a way that we can perceive what is given to us and then make time to create. The Reed of God by Caryl Houselander also draws us deeper into this posture. For the breeze to make music, the reed cannot be stiff or rigid or self-conscious. Rather, open, emptied, flexible, at rest.
The mode of grabbing and pressuring has been a temptation of late, as it is occasionally for most of us. As creators start sharing their fall décor schemes and brands begin their push of fall goods, I’ve thought to put away summer and buy the beautiful pumpkins at our farmer’s market. But this feels like a betrayal of the flowers and tomatoes. Can I wait until the outdoors tell me it’s time?
‘Can I?’ is the question, because underneath the rush and the push and the pressure is just fear. Could this passion be at the root of most troubles? Maybe.
If you’re a skeptic of seasonal decor, I don’t blame you. It’s an overwhelming, over-saturated thing. But maybe this could be your encouragement to see the value of the work, or to see it anew. As I’ve written before, the whole experience can be one of authentic freedom and communion: to walk across the grass, through the woods, to carry back that beauty into our interior worlds.
If you’re into seasonal decorating, I hope this maybe comes as the permission you need to reframe your work. All you need for your fall interior are a few tall branches with red berries or red leaves put in a vase. (Or wherever you live with whatever new natural color is available to you—bring it in.) You can put out some real pumpkins and squash (bonus if you’re able to eat them too). I am interested in art that can be swapped out to match the seasons. But the journey should be one of slow integration to mirror the way of things outside.
One morning, for example, we will need our coats when we go out (and let’s hope we all have one that fits!), and then that sensation of cold and what it means will stay with us. It will come time to cut down the browning flowers and vegetable stalks, to lay our root vegetables over with straw. Bittersweet vines, which I pick every fall, will draw back their yellow shells to bear bright red berries. Then, when we are ready to eat squash and pumpkins, it will be time to put them out. No sooner, I think.
And so begins my husband’s and my game at guessing the start of the new season. “Last warm day,” he’ll laugh to me soon. Actually, this attitude of play is right—akin to the wonder and the craft and the reed.
This is lovely! It brought back some great memories of using the Book of Nature Study with my kids.
I love this, thank you