Fall Equinox falls on Sunday, September 22nd, 2024 at 5:43 am PT.
It marks the beginning of Autumn in the US, and in the Celtic calendar, which aligns more closely with where I live in the PNW now, it’s the midway point, with Lughnasadh in early August as the start.
Veggies and fruits are being harvested and finishing up ripening in the last warm rays of the sun.
The light is changing—more angled, shining later on the gardens, highlighting the coming darkness.
And the sun is rising later and setting earlier—I find it surprising to wake up in darkness again!
Nancy Paddock’s poem “Lie Down” is a wonderful call for this season:
Lie down with your belly to the ground,
like an old dog in the sun. Smell
the greenness of the cloverleaf, feel the damp
earth through your clothes, let an ant
wander the uncharted territory
of your skin. Lie down
with your belly to the ground. Melt into
the earth’s contours like a harmless snake.
All else is mere bravado.
Let your mind resolve itself
in a tangle of grass.
Lie down with your belly
to the ground, flat out, on ground level.
Prostrate yourself before the soil
you will someday enter.
Stop doing.
Stop judging, fearing, trying.
This is not dying, but the way to live
in a world of change and gravity.
Let go. Let your burdens drop.
Let your grief-charge bleed off
into the ground.
Lie down with your belly to the ground
and then rise up
with the earth still in you.
Now in Autumn, the busyness of summer is slowing and we are being invited, like the leaves on the trees, to drop, to return, to slow down, to lie down as we move closer to winter.
Sometimes this invitation comes from somewhere deep within and the bodysoul has no choice but to respond.
This happened with my pre-cervical cancer scare 10+ years ago. Receiving that diagnosis brought me right to ground and forced me to reorder my life to include more rest, more self-care, more lying down…
Or a client with a major depression who ended up needing mental health support in a hospital. She received a strong call to return to the ground of her being and to work on building a new way of body, heart, and mind in order to rise back up into living.
And sometimes we find ourselves out in the living earth, and the invitation comes from an other-than-human being.
Like it did for me on retreat last month. I found myself captivated by a big old Doug Fir stump who was obviously returning to ground, very slowly.*
Sitting, praying, singing, grounding with this stump being.
Breathing and opening the fronds of my heart with the sword fern at theirs.
Dropping thoughts, over and over, into the earth.
Taking in all the life growing in and around.
It was raining steadily so I did not physically lie down on the earth, but I did with the rest of my bodysoul, allowing myself to dissolve with the rain into the ground, with the decaying life.
Letting go of trying to know, letting go of being separate, letting the ground, the stump being, and the forest hold me.
And when it was time, I rose up with the earth still in me to return to the human world… and then returned to practice with stump being again and again over the rest of the retreat.
As the leaves fall and we move with earth
deeper and deeper into Fall, toward Winter,
may we find ways to lie down
with our bellies to the ground—physically or not.
The earth is always here waiting for us.
* On retreat, all electronics were off and stashed, so I have no picture of this being to share.
Nourishing Wholeness 