Somewhere between what is leaving and what is returning, the sanctuary asks us simply to notice.
Today is the Fall Equinox, and I find myself standing once again at that familiar threshold between what was and what is yet to be.
The equinoxes have never felt quite the same to me. Spring arrives with an opening—a sense that everything is beginning. The days stretch longer, the garden wakes, and an entire season seems to lie ahead waiting to unfold.
Fall feels different.
Perhaps it is because summer has always been my favorite season. The Fall Equinox carries a quiet urgency with it, a feeling that I had better gather what remains before it slips away.
Yesterday I cleared another summer garden bed and tucked leaf lettuces and spring onions into the newly opened earth. Yet there are still tomatoes ripening on the vines, waiting to be harvested and put away for colder months. The tangerine marigolds are still blooming, too. I finally made a salad dressing with their petals and loved it so much that I’ve decided to gather more to make a compound butter.
I want to remember them.
Their sunny orange color. Their bright citrus scent released whenever I brushed against them while weeding. A little piece of summer preserved for a winter table.
But while I find myself hurrying to gather the last of one season, the sanctuary is already quietly welcoming another.
The first soaking rains came earlier this month, settling the summer dust and watering the gardens for me. And with that simple task taken from my hands, I was given something else instead.
Time to wander.
One morning Artemis and I followed our familiar path through the forest toward the meadow. A pair of pileated woodpeckers called somewhere in the distance, but otherwise the forest was quiet.
After months of dry summer ground, new life was appearing everywhere.
Tiny white fir-cone mushrooms, Strobilurus trullisatus, emerged from fallen cones along the trail. Lichens loosened by the rain were scattered beneath the trees, and I tucked a few pieces of Usnea into my pocket as we walked.
Then, near the meadow, I spotted what I first thought was a fallen branch.
Instead, it was an enormous, pristine piece of Usnea.
I stood there for a moment, amazed by this unexpected gift. Usnea is one of the lichens I use in my apothecary, so I gave thanks, gathered it, and carried it home.
The hawthorn is offering its gifts now, too. Its branches are heavy with deep red berries that will become cordials with apples and pomegranates, jam, tinctures, and dried medicine for the months ahead.
And now another old friend has returned.
Polypodium glycyrrhiza—licorice fern.
Its fresh green fronds are beginning to unfurl again among the moss and sword ferns. I look forward to its return every year. It has become one of my quiet harbingers of fall, and finding it again feels a little like greeting an old friend.
There is something wonderful about that.
While the garden is slowly winding down, the forest is waking up.
Spring and summer offer an abundance of leaves and flowers, but autumn has its own medicine—berries, mushrooms, lichens, the return of plants that have waited through the dry months for rain.
And there is another kind of medicine here, too.
The wandering itself.
After months filled with planting, watering, harvesting, preserving, milking and making, the rain gives a little time back. Time to walk without needing to accomplish anything. Time to hear the woodpeckers calling. To crouch beside mushrooms growing from a fir cone. To notice what has fallen from the trees. To walk beside Artemis and simply see what the sanctuary has to show me.
Perhaps that is one of the gifts of this season in between.
Every season offers its own medicine. Some of it we gather. Some of it we preserve so we can remember. And some of it we simply receive.
I have been walking through this seasonal threshold on this land for nearly three decades now. You might think that after so many years I would know exactly what waits on the other side.
But I don’t.
The sanctuary is never quite the same, and neither am I.
Each year there is something new to notice, something different to gather, something I hadn’t understood before.
So today I stand for just a little while at the threshold.
Behind me are tomatoes warmed by summer sun and the scent of tangerine marigolds against my hands. Ahead are rain-darkened trees, hawthorn berries, mushrooms, Usnea and the bright green unfurling of licorice fern.
Some things are leaving.
Some are returning.
And for this brief moment, I get to stand among both.
From the sanctuary,
Becky