Greetings to October

I love October, despite the fact that it is the time that our gardens become sleepy and disheveled.  This time of autumn colors and slowing down to build up strength for renewal is beautiful to me.  The air is crisp after so many days of summer's swelter, and it is evident that a shift is on the horizon.

In The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory, Jennifer Heath writes of her garden, inspired by the changes brought on in October:

Round and round.  I try never to think of the garden in terms of "success" or "failure." No gardener I know really does.  It seems inappropriate to bring the spirit of competition into this sacred place whose function is to mediate for the divine.

Gardens are completely personal, not up for judgment.  There's no right or wrong in Nature.  There are gardening flubs, miscalculations, and so on, but none of it matters much.  The garden is always in flux, forgiving, ready and able to teach, ready and able to change on its own, as well as with our interventions.  We bring our sorrows here to let our sorrows go; we bring our joy here to share our joy with birds and bees and flowers and trees.  Paradise is precisely here, in the oldest, strongest, most majestic oak and in the thinnest, weakest, most anemic window plant.  What counts is how we give ourselves to it.

 Success or failure, triumphs or troubles, whenever I look over the garden from my bedroom perch, I can see nothing but perfection, simply the Nature of it all.  Everything in the garden coexists in constant, active relation.  I am.

 Here, linear time ceases, so that history and myth blend seamlessly with this day, this moment, this breath.  In the garden we are entirely of the cycle: in summer we sense its retreat; in winter we hear the echoing green.

And soon, we will be hearing the echoing green.