Today at the Jolly Bungalow, it is a little chilly and I am starting to look forward to autumn with great joy. While summer is nice for raising a garden and sleeping under the stars, it’s also buggy and sticky. Autumn is crisp and fresh, and is the time for enjoying the harvest. My garden was promising in the spring, all but forgotten in the heat of summer, and I am pleased that it yielded lots and lots of tomatoes, which I have frozen and will someday turn into sauce.
I honestly don’t know how much of the garden I will have next year. This year‘s garden was part of a pandemic self-reliance, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it all that much. You are supposed to give a patch of ground a rest from growing tomatoes for a couple of years, so that may be my reason to have a much smaller garden next year, focused on herbs, lettuce, and a few flowers. I really liked the four marigold plants that I planted this year, and after the frost I will gather the flower heads for dye.
I see a lot of squirrels and chipmunks on my daily walk, because they’re in full harvest gathering mode too. The sandhill cranes are still here and I am glad that the meadows of the bungalow are one of their favorite places to hang out.
The celebration of the autumn equinox is the celebration of the harvest, not just on the physical level but also on the spiritual level. This year I will gather together four things that represent different aspects of the harvest for me. Each item will answer one of these questions:
What inspires your mind?
What fires your passion?
What sustains you emotionally?
What sustains you physically?
After I’ve gathered this year’s symbols of the harvest together, I will look back in my journal from last year at this time and see how different last year‘s symbols were.I don’t know with any certainty, but I suspect they were symbolic of the wider world that I lived in. This year they will be very much of this place.
I wonder how much my love of this season is centered on the fact that I was born in it? Do I feel a sense of a return to the very first time that I knew, and am I influenced by the celebration of my birthday? One reason that brings this to mind is that my father also loved this season and he celebrated his birthday eleven days after mine.
All indications say that life at the bungalow will be much of the same for the better part of next year. Yet, it will be so much easier because I know to go about it now. In fact, I wonder if I will even want to go back to my old life? This time here has given me permission to live more simply and to know the land and its resident spirits more deeply. I have embraced the present moment. Why would I go back to a more superficial life?
Tales from the jolly bungalow 