Tag: Autumn equinox

Equinox and the Middle Way

My Regular Pagan Holiday post

Dear Friends,

I’m writing this during a gentle rainstorm that has elicited delight among denizens here in Santa Rosa. Our weather station says it has brought a little less than an inch of rain. We are humbled when we think of raging floods elsewhere in the world but of course what we worry about at this time of the year is fire. Word is that the rain has dampened our biggest California fire, the Mosquito Fire, which has burned 75,000 acres in the Sierra foothills and is now 35 percent contained. This rain may not put an end to fire season, but we hope, as the fall equinox approaches, it marks the beginning of the end. This year the autumn equinox takes place on September 22, when the sun crosses the equator making night and day of equal length in all parts of the earth. 

In Japan the equinox symbolizes the middle way between the seasons. This week will mark the start of Higan, a seven-day Buddhist celebration and national holiday in Japan during the fall and spring equinoxes. The origin of the holiday dates from Emperor Shomu in the 8th century. Higan means the “other shore” and refers to the spirits of the dead reaching Nirvana. It is a time to remember the dead by visiting, cleaning, and decorating their graves. The red spider lily signals shūbun, the arrival of fall. 

Buddhist psychology is neither a path of denial nor of affirmation. It shows us the paradox of the universe, within and beyond the opposites. It teaches us to be in the world but not of the world. This realization is called the middle way.

If we seek happiness purely through indulgence, we are not free. If we fight against ourselves and reject the world, we are not free. It is the middle path that brings freedom. This is a universal truth discovered by all those who awaken.

The middle way describes the middle ground between attachment and aversion, between being and non-being, between form and emptiness, between free will and determinism. The more we delve into the middle way the more deeply we come to rest between the play of opposites.

When we discover the middle path, we neither remove ourselves from the world nor get lost in it. We can be with all our experience in its complexity, with our own exact thoughts and feelings and drama. We learn to embrace tension, paradox, change. Instead of seeking resolution, waiting for the chord at the end of a song, we let ourselves open and relax in the middle. In the middle we discover that the world is workable. From the book The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield

Here in Sonoma County at fall equinox we celebrate the end of those super hot days of summer. There was a day in August when we set a heat record of 115 degrees here. 

We may still get some 90 degree days, but the withering heat is behind us and the cold of winter is yet to come. No more flex alerts! We look forward to enjoying the outdoors in this mild season.

Native aster

Like all Californians we are conserving water during an ongoing drought. Our vegetable garden is not as robust and productive as in wetter years, but native plants thrive. Favorites include native Epilobium in bright reds and pinks, eriogonum (wild buckwheat), and a purple native aster given to us by a neighbor, still blooming happily without water! Birds of all feathers converge on our garden to eat the seeds of spent wildflower blooms.

Wishing you a tranquil equinox.

Love, Molly (and Holly)

Celebrating the Autumn Equinox

September 23, 2019

One thing I love about living in Santa Rosa is seasons! Our garden still flourishes and flowers bloom, but one day in August, we could suddenly see that the height of summer was over and summertime had begun falling down. And now it’s the autumn equinox. Called Mabon by the Wiccans, the fall equinox marked the second harvest festival to the Celts. Day and night are of equal length and now dark will lengthen till the winter solstice when the light will start to gain again.

The big squash in the foreground came from last year’s Heirloom Expo

I don’t know exactly what the Celts harvested at the second harvest but here in Sonoma County September is the month of grapes and figs, and of course cannabis. Last year at the Heirloom Expo we drooled over a slew of fig tree species. I had grown figs in San Francisco but the one time a lovely Mission fig finally ripened a raccoon got to it before I could harvest, and broke the whole branch off in the process. That was it for me. That winter I dug out the entire plant. San Francisco’s foggy cool summers just don’t go with figs, although I did see some happy trees there, just not in my backyard. But figs love it here! So this spring we planted one. It’s called a Celestial, a small, rosy sweet fig, and we ate the first one in August. Also our neighbors T and JJ have a mature fig tree and I’ve been making myself sick on them. There’s nothing like a ripe fig perhaps eaten with a slice of local sheep’s milk cheese.

This is not an indictment of San Francisco weather (except when you’re freezing your ass off in the cold wind and fog waiting in line at the gay film festival in June!). I gardened in the same Bernal Heights yard for 38 years. There are some plants that thrive there. Nasturtiums! One year they took over the whole yard. I bought local gardener Pam Peirce’s books, learned about micro climates and the secret season that we didn’t have in my hometown of Yakima, Washington. I became friends with Pam and visited her abundant Excelsior back yard garden. But early on I gave up tomatoes and embraced flowers. Bernal Heights is just up the hill from the Alemany Farmers’ Market where every Saturday I could find seasonal organic produce. Why kill myself fighting shade and fog to grow some tortured veggies?

Zinnias! Love Santa Rosa, hate San Francisco

But tomatoes love the hot summers here. We are still harvesting tomatoes but it wasn’t like last year when we had to give bagsful away to neighbors. One plant suddenly died and gardener friends suggested gophers were eating the roots. Yikes! We had been happily gopher free. But I figured out the problem. I had watered the plant with a hose that had been sitting out in the hundred degree heat. I boiled the roots to death!

I didn’t make it to the climate march September 20. But I did eschew the car and take public transportation to Tradeswomen Inc.’s 40th anniversary celebration in Oakland where I got to commune with 400 tradeswomen. Then on Saturday night I took the Lamplight Tour of Santa Rosa’s historic rural cemetery. It’s a phenomenal production requiring the work of 120 volunteers who wrote, performed and organized eight vignettes about local history. We learned about the influence of the KKK in Sonoma County in the 1920s, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Jack London’s story about a local miner and more. Something tells me I’ll get sucked into working with this group of citizens interested in local history.

Naked ladies bloom at the Rural Cemetery

And next week I’ll travel to Minneapolis for the Women Build Nations national tradeswomen conference where history will also be a focus of discussion. A lot of us old timers realize we need to be recording it now before dementia sets in. Along with Brigid O’Farrell I’ll be leading the writers workshop. Methinks a book is in the offing.

Wishing all an auspicious autumn season.

 

 

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