Harvest Time

This year, the Autumnal Equinox follows the Harvest Full Moon within five days, so harvest time is very much in our awareness as the new season begins.

In the current cultural context, harvest has multi-layered meanings.

The successful completion of any project or creative endeavor may be viewed as a form of harvest.  For this success to occur there is a sequence.

First, the project or creative endeavor begins as a seed — an envisioning.  Then, there is self-effort, or collaboration with others.  The bringing to harvest involves energy output and nurturing, attention-to-intention which then consistently contributes to the growing into maturity of that which is envisioned.

Harvest in the traditional sense is — obviously — that which takes place when crops have grown to maturity.  This entire process has taken place within a similar sequence:  the sowing of seeds, the nurturing, the attention to what is needed at any given time within the growing season.

In New England, it is probably the maturing of the apples upon countless trees which are most symbolic of harvest time.

A New Englander of many generations ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spoke of an astounding growing-into-maturation process within Mother Nature’s world — one which takes place without the involvement of humankind — when he said:  “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

That wide view as to the growing process, over centuries, places into perspective, as an example, something Aristotle expressed:“In all things of nature, there is something of the miraculous.”

As the Autumn season begins, we celebrate both Harvest Time and the miraculous within Mother Nature’s world.

Image by lumix2004 from Pixabay.