As the wheel starts to turn into the latter part of autumn towards winter, I am reminded of the first time, the very first time that I saw autumn in all its glory. I was born in a part of the UK where there are few deciduous trees. There were plenty of trees but they are all conifers. The woods having been cut down during the war and replaced with fast growing evergreens. This means that growing up I had never experienced the glory of the autumn leaves changing colour. My first experience of this was when I moved to Sheffield to attend university. I had never seen such an array of colourful leaves. I was fascinated by them and some of those leaves were so big. There were so many different colours and so many different types of leaf. I would walk though one of Sheffield’s many parks mesmerised and as the leaves fell I would play in them. No pile of dry autumn leaves were safe from me. I would frequently roll around in them delighted with life and this new world of autumn colour that had opened up to me. I would spend hours examining the leaves and how the different colours blended. I bought myself some drawing paper and chalks and would frequently sketch the leaves trying to communicate via drawing my inner experience of my relationship with them.
I knew nothing of chaos magick back then but I still knew instinctively that the entire multi verse could be experienced through a single leaf. Chaos manifests through the leaves in one way and I manifest chaos in a different way but we are both chaos. By contemplating the leaves the illusion of division between the cosmos and the I broke down so there was no I.
It’s now 37 years since I first played with the leaves and my fascination and delight has not withered. I still find piles of dry autumn leaves incredibly tempting. Sometimes I still play with the leaves in the parks feeling at one with the cosmos.
The changing colours of autumn heralds the dark time of the year. This is frequently seen in paganism as the time of endings as the year winds to a close and bursts once more into life after the winter solstice. For me however, it’s always been a time of beginnings. This is largely due to autumn being the start of the academic year. As a young person I would have new classes, new books, new clothing, new teachers/ lecturers. Being a person interested in book learning I would feel an inner excitement with the whole of the academic year spread in front of me with new things to study and learn. During my first autumn in Sheffield I had added layers of excitement with a new city, a new place to live and everything was different. This strongly imprinted onto my young mind the association of autumn with new, sometimes terrifying but also liberating things coming into my life.
Since then it has been forever thus, the winds of the autumn season blowing out the old and bringing in the new.
I feel it’s not as simple as one time of the year being a time for endings and another part of the year, usually spring, being for beginnings. Both ending and beginning can run concurrently. There is an eternal arising and passing away in a continual cycle, with the ending and beginnings of different things happening at the same time. The turning of the green leaves for me does not symbolise simply an ending but a beginning, a beginning of the orange/ yellow/ brown phase.
For me this is symbolised within the chaos star with the outwards facing arrows representing the coming into being. The inward facing arrows implied between the outward facing ones represents the passing away, or the return to chaos for rebirth. The coming into being and the dissolution into chaos happens continuously. I find that if I listen closely enough I can hear it as the drum beat of the multi verse.
So as the leaves fall in their glory and splendour I embrace the change blown in with the winds looking forward to what new adventures the changes will bring.
