TISHREI 5784 MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD

CONTINENTAL ECOSYSTEM:  EARLY FALL  PUTTING FOOD BY

Tishrei is the month of early fall. We can feel with the touch of Fall that winter will not be far behind; the endlessness of the heat and languidness of summer is gone. A cold winter is coming for which we need to prepare.

The stems of the pepper plants are showing their age and the corn stalks are slowly losing their green color in favor of brown.  The cucumbers died last month and the winter squash fruit is ready while the plants are dying.  The oak trees in my backyard are starting to change color, while the hickorys’ and beeches’ leaves are still green. But they have stopped growing and a bit more variety of color comes into them as the month progresses.  They are preparing to die. 

The birds are quieter, their mating rituals ancient history from the spring, the young raised for the year.  The stags are in rut, and I see them occasionally after missing them all year, just as I see their presence on a few more trees in the woods. This is a time of year where I often see baby squirrels come out and play, chasing each other up and down trees and jumping from one to the other just because they can—or so I imagine. The squirrels start to put away nuts against the winter; not desperate yet (that will be next month), but they know, better than we do, that winter is coming.  The deer start to change color throughout the month; what was redder becomes browner and grayer, the better to blend in with the woods.  The fawns start to lose their spots and I worry about the last summer fawns—are they big enough to make it through the winter if it is a hard one?  They seem so much smaller than their older cousins who were born in spring.

The trees give up their fruit in serious quantities—oaks, hickories, beech nuts all fall and are sought out by the deer, the squirrels, other creatures I don’t see.  The deer start to walk across the lawn parallel to the tree line, looking for nuts instead of forbs and leaves. 

The preservation of food kicks into full swing.  I first arrived on a commune after college in September.  The commune grew 60% of its food, and September was harvesting and processing.  We filled the freezers with green beans and peppers and the shelves with canned tomatoes—jar after jar after jar.  If we would have had apples, it would have been time to make jam and cider, and time to put away winter squash and cure sweet potatoes.  It is time to harvest corn and put it into the crib for both human and livestock consumption over the winter.  Corn, for all of its bad reputation because of the way it has been tortured by agribusiness, is a miracle crop.  It is a core part of the possibility of civilization in what we call the Americas.

The flowers on the tomatoes and green peppers seem oddly out of place.  Don’t know they that there isn’t time to be fertilized and turn into fruit before the frost comes?  The squash vines start to die, if they have made it this long, revealing their fruit, hard against the way they will be mindlessly handled and tossed

The world is turning again, as it has for millions of years, an unending cycle in which we have been formed, like water to a fish.  There’s a rightness to this rhythm, even as I miss the heat of summer and don’t look forward to the cold of winter.  In my prayers, I praise the divine for the cycle of birth and death without which the beautiful world would not exist.  I remind myself that there is no death without life, an obvious concept, and there is no life without death, a more difficult concept.  I pray for as deep an understanding as possible that I, like all beings, are part of this cycle of life and death, whether I embrace it or not.

Fall is the beginning of the descent into darkness of winter.  We harvest the plentitude of the rain and sun of the spring and summer, plants stop growing, lawnmowers are put away, the garden is put to bed for the winter except for a few hardy crops such as garlic or kale poking up their heads over the mulch.  We will be invited to slow down, to curl inside of ourselves, to sit by the fire with something warm to drink and tell stories—but not quite yet.

QUESTIONS

• What have I harvested or not harvested in the past year?

• What needs to be prepared now for the coldness of winter?

• What inside of me needs to prepare to die?

• What needs to come out and rut like the stag?