Fall Hunter Moon
The winds howled from Mt. Evans early this morning, signals of a sudden change in the weather. We’re cooling down. The winds blow finished gold leaves into the air, creating bright spots of light fluttering in the shadows of the lodgepole pines. This is the time of that not-so-gentle stripping of the deciduous tree’s leaves. Up here that means the aspens will soon be leafless and slowing down like the calorie gorging bears. Winter, as they say on HBO, is coming.
The sliver moon that rose last night marked the beginning of ten days of High Holy Days for Jews across the world. Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Shana tova! Happy new year in Hebrew.
Kate, Jon and I went to the service at Beth Evergreen last night. It was a joyful event with lots of singing punctuated by readings from the prayerbook. Occasionally certain men would bow. Others had prayer shawls, many wore yarmulkes, many (including me) did not. It was not fancy dress, though some were dressed up, including me.
The service commemorates the creation of the world and a Jewish belief that God must continuously recreate the world. This opens up the possibility of a truly new world being formed at the new year just as it opens up the possibility of a truly new you. So, this is a moment of celebrating the coming of the new year, 5777, and the opportunity to shed last year’s skin and to redecorate.
In this case I reinterpret God as the creative principle in the world, along the lines of process metaphysics, a notion made popular by Alfred North Whitehead. If we lean into that creative principle, we can reshape ourselves and our environment. The actual execution of such changes are made much easier by life in community, especially a beloved community. That’s the potential power of a congregation.
Having all this come while the sky is bright blue, while the aspens are showing what they’ve done with their one wild and precious life, while the crispness of autumn begins to change the nights, makes the Great Wheel and the cycle of the Jewish calendar sync up.
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.
The clouds are at 8,800 feet this morning. We’re surrounded by and inside them. A foggy start to the day.
Black Mountain, which is covered in lodgepole pine and actually green as a result, has small gold flecks this morning. Those few aspen groves on its slopes have begun to turn, as have more and more aspens between here and Evergreen, but not those on our property. Too, Orion appeared in the southern sky a week or so ago, the early morning southern sky. On Shadow Mountain Orion and the changing of the aspens are true harbingers of autumn.
Palisade, Colorado has had a bumper peach harvest. There is a small area on the Western Slope that has an ideal peach growing microclimate. They have other crops, too: lavender, apples, sweet corn, strawberries and vegetables. The newspapers have carried photo spreads of workers in the orchards with peach baskets gently picking and placing the delicate fruit into baskets. Back in Andover, this time of year, the honey harvest would be in, the raspberries just beginning. I would be out planting garlic and pulling the last plantings of carrots, beets, leeks and onions. This is the peak harvest season, when the land and its workers combine to feed millions, even billions of people.
Being so far removed from farms and large truck gardens feels strange to this former Midwestern lifer. No more so than in this long harvest season. Corn pickers and combines have begun to roll through fields. The state fairs have swept up 4-H’er raised cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens. The vegetable harvest has peaked. Self pick apple orchards have hayrides and cider stations set out. Not there, though.
Labor Day does mark the winding down of one season long harvest up here: tourist dollars from Denver folks. July and August are the heaviest tourist months for our favorite mountain town, Evergreen. We’re not a winter tourist destination, at least not like the ski resorts, so the roads will have less traffic and fewer visitors in Evergreen’s restaurants.
