Beloved,
It is harvesting time here in the Northern Hemisphere. The orchards are heavy with fruit, the tomatoes juicy and ripe, the cool air in the evenings vibrant with both sweetness and melancholy. This is the season when the seeds, once hidden in the dark earth, reveal their promise, when we gather what has ripened, and when we offer our thanks.
Last Monday, our little circle here in Northern California met by the river for Temple practice, with our baskets full of offerings of flowers and fruits for the altar. The evening was soft and still warm, even as the light slipped away earlier than expected, reminding us that the sacred wheel of the year keeps turning, and that we too are changing with the cycles of the sun.
Together we explored the seeds we had planted earlier in the year and what we are harvesting now. We prayed, softened, and received ecstatic Temple Touch, held in such a profound sense of peace and safety by the oak trees, the river and the peachy evening sky.
I am harvesting peace and simplicity. Seeds I planted years ago are now coming into full fruition. Even through times I had to make difficult decisions, pruning, and moving things around. Times when it was hard to see any growth, I have kept watering, tending, weeding and praying over these seeds. And now the garden is blooming. It is feeding me, nourishing me, filling me.
Last weekend I went to Boulder, Colorado, where I practiced with an extraordinary group of women, where we brought healing to our mother line and rooted ourselves in Source connection, in Eternal Mother. Also here the simplicity, the peace, the ripening was palpable. The wisdom and healing we all get to receive, are the fruits of years of our shared devotion, seeds that have ripened and bloomed into soul nourishment, for us and generations to come.
In the ancient stories, the grain goddess Demeter teaches us that the harvest is inseparable from loss. When Her beloved daughter Persephone is taken into the underworld, Demeter wanders the earth in grief. Her sorrow is so deep that the fields grow barren, the flowers wither, and the rivers run dry. Out of her mourning, winter is born.
Yet within the darkness, another rhythm is already at work. What seems like an ending carries the seed of return. The grief of descent prepares the way for renewal.
The return of Persephone from the underworld, is the spring bringing the greening of the earth, the bursting of seeds, and the promise of life renewed. The cycle of growth, ripening, death, and renewal is written into the very body of the Goddess, into the body of the earth, and into each one of us.
The abundance of the harvest is not separate from the grief of what must be released. Every fruit ripening carries within it that which will be composted, every fullness is also the ache of impermanence. To harvest is to celebrate and to mourn all at once.
And you, beloved one, what are you harvesting? What fruits of your longing, your devotion, your labor are being revealed to you now?
I invite you to take a moment to contemplate. What seeds did you plant in the spring, or perhaps earlier, that are now coming to fruition? What nourishment is being offered to you? And just as important, what is ending? What needs to be released back into the earth with gratitude, what needs to be grieved as it passes? Let yourself soften into the fullness of the cycle, both the ripening and the letting go, the joy and the ache of the turning seasons.
And let’s say our thanks, for being given another breath, another taste of an apple, another moment to bow and say, yes.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
With Love, Always,
Chameli
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