Happy Fall, y'all!

It’s the Autumn Equinox today! The start of my favorite season!

After a few days of wonderfully fall-like weather, autumn officially kicked off with weather that is better suited for summer: warm, clammy, and hazy. Blech.

My Celtic Devotional offers this greeting to the Autumn Equinox:

Hail! Journeyer of the Heavens,
Queen of Brightness, King of Beauty!
Gifts of gladness richly bringing
Autumn sheaves and red leaves’ fall.
Generous be the heart within us,
Open be our hands to all,
Justice to be in equal measure,
Harvest thankfulness our call.

It also provides a list of activities for the autumn months (including, among others, “Walk and meditate outdoors for at least fifteen minutes daily,” “Identify plants and trees by their autumn color and find out about their habitats and qualities,” and “Be active with like-minded others, in bringing healing or relief to living things in distress, whether human, animal, plant, etc.”)

Other bits and bobbles include:

I brighten my soul with the colors of Autumn:
hue of light,
hue of life,
hue of love,
color my mind, my body, my heart.
May my soul be preserved
from chill of dawn
till call of dark.

******

I veil my soul with the hues of Autumn:
veil of light upon my mind,
veil of life upon my body,
veil of love upon my heart.
The blessing veil of Autumn’s dusk
be upon all beings,
both now and then,
both now and when.

I just hope that our dry summer doesn’t translate into lackluster foliage this fall. The colors were rather washed out last year, and I’d like to erase that memory with an autumn full of blazing delight.

Meanwhile, I hopped on board the Heart Attack Express this morning when, as I dropped an empty milk jug into the recycling bin outside my house, a stray cat leapt out from beneath my neighbors’ back stairs, which are right next to the recycling bin. My stunned heart wriggled free from its moorings, shot from my mouth, and landed on the ground with a twitchy splat.

Also? There were two mornings last week when I was awoken at exactly 4:30am by the sound of my upstairs neighbor praying. His loud praying and his dirge-like hymns (along with other noise issues, such as his son’s periodic bouts of screamed prayers and hallelujahs; the family’s
stomping around on hardwood floors; the fact that I can hear every word they say; their penchant for dropping heavy objects on the floor for no discernable reason, causing the cats and me to jump several feet in the air several times a day; the loud bass of their TV; and the weekly visits from their toddler grandchild, who apparently only has two skills: screeching, and noisily racing around [which translates into thumpthumpthumpthump on the wooden floors, for those of you who are keeping score at home]) has been a point of contention for well over a year, but never has the praying woken me up at the dastardly hour of 4:30am—a full two hours before my alarm was set to go off. I was not impressed.

song heard most recently before posting: Merman—Tori Amos