Spring.

Autumn isn’t a season. It’s a mood within a cultural tradition, that views life as a flow out of the earth during certain degrees of tilt of its northern shoulder  towards or away from the sun. In other words, it’s the mood that a certain group of humans have come to use as a means of reading that quality of light. Previous groups of humans used standing stones, moons, stories, songs, or the amount of water falling from the sky.

Leaving seasons behind is liberating. The flow remains. It exists in the image above, which is traditionally read in Canada as a falling away into a time of rest before the life force springs forth again, combined with a sense of ripeness. This is an ancient world that Europeans brought from Asian millennia ago. In the Okanagan, though, it says that the land in the image below is dead from the effects of summer, since it isn’t springing forth, and is waiting to be returned to a watery state by winter before springing forth again.

That’s simply not true. That dry scene has already sprouted with mid-August thunderstorms and is soaking up October’s rains. This is spring, just before the great time of growth under the lens of the snow. Life here is not about a springing forth, but about a holding. And that’s the beauty of it.