Autumn

Autumn is the season of letting go. The trees do it visibly, which is perhaps why it moves people the way it does. Something in us recognises the gesture. The deliberate release of what can no longer be sustained. Not loss, exactly. Preparation. In the old calendar autumn was the season of harvest and of reckoning. What had grown, what had not. What would carry through winter, what would not. There was a practicality to it that has mostly left modern life, but the instinct remains. Autumn pulls at something. A desire to take stock. To finish things. To put things in order before the dark comes. In reality autumn is also the season of grief for the light. The days shortening noticeably from August onward. The body registering it before the mind does, a heaviness, a slowing, a turn inward. This is not depression. It is a seasonal adjustment, the body preparing for winter the way it always has. What it does to the body. Appetite increases. Sleep lengthens. The urge to be indoors, to be warm, to eat things that take time to cook. These are not failures of will. They are biology, the same biology that has carried humans through winters for hundreds of thousands of years. What you can do with it. Finish something you started. Let something go that you have been holding past its time. Cook something slow. Light things earlier in the evening. Mark the equinox, the moment when day and night are equal and the balance tips toward dark. Autumn asks for honesty. What is worth keeping. What is not. Say this, as the leaves turn or whenever the season asks it of you: I release what is finished. I keep what matters. I am ready for the quiet.