Kate Braun : Fall Equinox is Celebration of Balance

By Kate Braun / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2011

“We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came…” — The Circle Game

Friday, September 23, 2011 is Mabon, Harvest Home, the Fall Equinox.

Friday is Frigga’s day; her power combines with Lady Moon’s waning energies to achieve the harmony traditional to this celebration of balance. When the hours of daylight and darkness are equal, as they are twice a year, there is a quantifiable balance which can be measured. Harmony comes from within and is an immeasurable quality in our lives.

With the loss of homes and trees to wildfires, with the disruption of the rhythms of our lives, not only balance but also harmony is being lost. I strongly recommend making the time on September 23 to perform whatever actions or rituals are helpful to restoring feelings of both balance and harmony. Only then will we be able to create plans for moving forward.

Use the colors red, orange, russet, maroon, brown, deep gold, and violet; select from gourds, pine cones, acorns, apples, dried seeds, grapes, autumn leaves, horns of plenty, cauldrons, and ivy for your decorations; drape your table and clothe yourself in textured fabrics such as velvet, velour, and corduroy.

This is a season sacred to Cerridwen, a Celtic Goddess of Autumn. Her symbol is the cauldron; her fruit is the apple; all nuts and seeds are sacred to her. Lore tells us that when souls leave the body they go to Cerridwen’s cauldron, where she stirs the brew that helps the souls within the cauldron make good sense of the lives they have left. When that lesson is learned, then the soul is ready for the next lesson in another body, another life, another time.

Such is the seasonal progression of the soul, measured in lifetimes, not months, and just as rhythmical as the turning of the Wheel of Life.

Change is inevitable. It will come when it will come, not always when we choose. As we should now be mindful of the needs of others, we should also be mindful of the changes in our lives and not be too quick to label them negative changes. In Brother Cadfael’s Penance: the Twentieth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury (Mysterious Press, 1994), Ellis Peters writes:

The year proceeds not in a straight line through the seasons, but in a circle that brings the world and man back to the dimness and mystery in which both began, and out of which a new seed-time and a new generation are about to begin.

Out of the ashes of homes and forests a new beginning shall rise.

[Kate Braun‘s website is www.tarotbykatebraun.com. She can be reached at kate_braun2000@yahoo.com. Read more of Kate Braun’s writing on The Rag Blog.]

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