We just had our first snowfall Sunday here in the Boston area. With leaves still on the trees and tomatoes still on the vine, the snow was a short preview of what is coming.
This past week brought us All Hallows eve and the old Gaelic festival of Samhain (pronounced Sah-win or Sow-in or so I have learned from Wikipedia), and our Daylight Saving Time period ending. I could feel the coming of darkness, which become more evident Sunday afternoon when it started getting dark at dinnertime. We have ended the time of harvest and begun the preparation for winter, having passed the midpoint between the equinox and the solstice.
We are truly in the season of autumn, which East Asian medicine systems link with grief and letting go. While our culture doesn’t like to accept that letting go is part of life, focusing instead of new beginnings and growth, autumn reminds all of us that everything has an end. It is good that things end and we need to let go, after all, as the comedian Stephen Wright put it “you can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”
Letting go is necessary to make space for the new. It is the time to reassess our priorities, to look at what is taking up our time and energy and ask if it nurtures us enough to get us through our times of darkness. If not, how can I let go with thanks and acknowledgment? For that is the flip side of autumn in East Asian medicine, the virtue of the season: appreciation and acknowledgment. When I acknowledge the value of something, I receive its gift, I am enriched and I can let go of the thing/person knowing I carry its value with me.
I encourage you to take a moment in this time of coming darkness. To stand still for a moment, to feel the earth underneath your feet, connecting out of the bottoms of your soles to the earth and remembering all the gifts brought from earth. The food we eat (as removed from the earth as it sometimes is), all the materials of our life from the bed we sleep on to the cell phone we carry, all are products of the earth. All are gifts given to us by nature, however much humans have removed and reworked the basic components. Take a moment to acknowledge these larger gifts, then ask what gifts the earth has given you personally and how they have enriched you. Then, see if you can experience through sensation, emotion and/or thought how that gift lives on in you and continues to give throughout your life, no matter in small or large ways.
Practicing gratitude and acknowledgment becomes the base from which we can begin to let go. You can’t give up food if you don’t have anything to eat. You can’t give up something unless you feel secure there will be more to come. Practicing the virtue of acknowledgment gives one the resources to face the times of hardship and pain and to let go when necessary.
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