The Web of Fall

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, and you've been to the woods recently, you might have noticed that things feel a little bit different than they did a month ago. The leaves are on the ground. The branches are more and more bare. There is a sense of peace. And yet there is busy activity, too. The squirrels are racing around, trying to find enough to take them through the winter. Here in Southern Ontario, the starlings are gathering in huge flocks that fly in seemingly random, but coherent patterns, like giant airborne schools of fish. Wild geese are calling to each other in the evening skies.

Calm and a sense of preparation mingle at this time of year. This is a season of culmination, and a season of planting new seeds. After all, this is when the trees and grasses do their planting. Why shouldn't we?

This is the energetic new year. This is the end of one energy cycle in the natural world, and the time of preparation for the next. If you're thinking about resolutions, now is the time.

Throughout the summer, the trees have been working on building themselves up physically. This has meant drawing abundant energies from the earth, and drawing equally abundantly from the sun. As the autumn equinox approached, the trees prepared to release their energies in great gouts upward into the sky. What we see as the release of leaves is only the aftereffect of this energetic release, a ritual that they call "releasing the sun," as the solar energy retreats from the earth, and we enter the dark half of the year.

Now, throughout the autumn, the trees concentrate their energies in their trunks. They glow and pulse with light, and create an interconnecting web as they commune with each other. These energies will reach a climax at the winter solstice, when the trees will re-seed Mother Earth through energetic taproots that they've also been creating at this time.

Until then, they'll celebrate the end of another successful year with each other, communicating via webs that spread across continents. When we walk in the woods at this time of year, and appreciate the leaves and the beauty of the bare branches, we become part of the web. This, I think, is why any hiker will tell you that fall is one of the most glorious times to be outside and among trees.

So get out there!  Spend time with the trees right now, and enjoy some of the richest, most uplifting energies that are available throughout the year.