The holiday emotional swell is cresting and grief keeps loosening its knots in unexpected places. Just in time for fall turning to winter, the great hunker down. My life is contracting in a lot of ways right now. Relationships waning, some even pinching off, all to make room for the dark season. Winter is coming, literally, and I am not ready. Are we ever ready. We are thrust into a pit of cold darkness, our turn on this globe to settle down and settle in. Let the other half enjoy the energetic bump of summer.

Autumn is Vata season — the season of Air and Space, correlating most often to Sattva Guna. Air is cold, light, mobile, dry, free, detached. Air encourages movement, withering, detachment. Air agitates and evaporates water, carrying it off to some other side of the globe to be used in the swell of the opposite hemisphere. The air is carrying water from my body, my lips, my skin, pulling moisture outward in the great seasonal exchange.