An Autumn Equinox Ritual

Day Schildkret offers a Shake and Harvest Ritual. His newest book is Hello, Goodbye: 75 Rituals for Times of Loss, Celebration and Change.

- By Day Schildkret

The closer you get to the light, the closer you also get to the darkness.

—PARKER PALMER

There’s a shift. You can feel it in the air. You can sense it in the light. You can see it in the leaves. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, all that was bright is quickly fading as the time teeters on the edge between dark and light. Everything must eventually change, and so the autumn equinox is a time to reassess—to come back, look around, and take stock of how things are, of what you have, of what you’ve lost, of all the success and the mistakes you’ve made along the way—and by doing so to renew yourself and your purpose at this turning of the year.

The Old English word for autumn was actually “harvest.” Not only is this a time of gathering, plucking, and reaping crops, but also a time of reckoning with all that life has given us and how we have shown up to receive it. Have our hands been grabby, clingy, or possessive? Have we hoarded our harvests and kept our gifts to ourselves? Have we taken more when we’ve already been full? Or maybe we find that our thoughts are only focusing on scarcity when life is trying to show us its abundance? This time of harvest is asking us to not only reap the gifts of this season but also wonder about how we are taking them.