Autumn Equinox

Summer has been sitting on the gate these last few weeks, this morning she got down and tucked her dress into her belt, pulled her shawl around her shoulders and set off striding out across the fields turning the edges of the leaves to russets and browns as she went, blowing them off the trees and along the lane.  

Autumn arrived with a freezing wind and a typical Dartmoor recital of rain/shine/rain/shine... Today is the Autumn Equinox - that moment when day and night are of equal length and we start moving into darkening.

The sky is full of rainbows and the hedges full of spider's webs. Daisy and Druid have their noses in the hedge picking blackberries and we have been harvesting and gathering like creatures about to hibernate (wouldn't that be lovely).

This is a small portion of the chilly crop which I couldn't help playing with.

The last of the beans - which will be runner bean chutney.  This is a Devon speciality and well worth a try if you don't know it.  One of the nicest ways to use up the stringy end of season beans and so delicious you might even spare some of the less stringy ones for it. The recipe is here for you.

Two lots of Hedgerow Jelly are sitting in the larder already, waiting for homemade bread to be toasted and laden with butter on a winter's evening.

Out walking this morning I came upon this - a most beautiful acorn.

And it served to remind me that the seeds of next year's growth are always present in the dying of this year.  That there is always something cooking away in the belly of the earth; perhaps to be delicious today, perhaps waiting for exactly the right moment to pop up in the far distant future.  On this day, when the light and the darkness are of equal length what will your prayers be?  What will you take into the darkness with you so that it can rest in the arms of the Wild Mother as she prepares to sleep? What needs nurturing?