What the Autumn Has to Teach Us
Naming the decay and other cheery practices
Around September 21st, I realized I was lacking an autumn equinox ritual. I know what you are thinking—This cannot be! Jackie doesn’t have a seasonal ceremony lined up? SOUND THE ALARM!
Okay, fine. None of you were thinking that.
‘Tis true, I love a seasonal ritual, and if you want to hook me into a conversation, try the question, “What is the current season of your soul?” All of this makes sense to my childhood brain formed deep in the rhythms of four distinct Midwest seasons and to my artist brain that loves a metaphor. Of course, there are a million ways to do it cheesy and terrible, but if someone gives me a ritual that hits the mood of the moment, I am theirs forever.
In all my pondering about the seasons and what they mean for us, I was aghast to find I’d neglected fall.
Part of this is because September and October are the warmest months of the year here near San Francisco. The wind stills, Karl the Fog takes a vacation, and the light is so delicious it turns us all into poets. It’s the only time I swim in the frigid Pacific and the only time I wear shorts, smushed with the sweaty crowds at the annual bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park.
Even after a decade of this phenomenon, the whole summer-in-the-autumn thing throws me off, and I am never prepared for the holidays. The other day I walked into Target and audibly gasped “NO!” when I saw the dollar spot covered in Christmas goods and heard carols piping into the store, startling myself and the innocent seekers of discount cheer.
“That’s a touch dramatic, Jack,” I laughed at myself. “What’s that about?”
It seems I am craving fall.
We have a bit of a rocky relationship, fall and me. It wasn’t always this way, and then, before the decade of September summers, I spent three years in Michigan. Although I loved the nostalgic activities—football season, bonfires, apple cider mills, I encountered an unfamiliar melancholy sweeping over me when the leaves started changing.
And melancholy is not where I naturally live. I never got close to a goth stage. In fact, in high school, I had to ask my teacher for an alternative option to the assigned Stephen King book because my sunshine soul could not handle the darkness. When it came time for the class to watch the movie, I was too embarrassed to ask to leave, so I wore my glasses instead of my contacts that day so I could take them off during the movie. These were desperate times. Imagine sweet Jackie, sitting in Hoopeston Area High, “watching” blurry Stephen King. I’ve never been so thankful for terrible eyesight.
If I have to do darkness, give me a night-blooming flower. If I have to do brokenness, give me the craft of kintsugi, where ceramics are repaired with gold. We will bloom again! We will put it back together, and it will be beautiful, I tell you! I’ve even come to accept that we have deep winters of our lives, that some things die, and grief is part of life. But autumn? The anticipation of what we are losing—after the harvest, before the barren, sitting as things break and change, and letting go with grace? No, this is not where I shine. Although I love the color change on the trees, I’m out there, trying to tape them back on the branches.
When I quit my last job, my friend gave me a card with the line, “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” She’d bought it months, years? earlier, waiting for me to be ready. It almost killed me to be ready, to acknowledge I could not fix what was broken, and to say goodbye.
This was not the only time I’ve done this. I’ve agonized about every job I’ve ever left. On the official scale, I’m a Hold-er-on-er. It’s always been this way. Show me what you were sad about as a kid, and I’ll show you how you loved the world. I sobbed for weeks when my best friend in kindergarten moved away, at every camp bonfire night when leaving my bosom friends of five whole days, and at the end of Titanic. (Now there was a movie worth watching!)
Big, big heart. Also a little unhinged.
It’s time to let go, Jack.
See why I need an autumn ritual?
God bless the weird artists of the Bay Area because before I could book a ticket to Switzerland to watch the cows come home,1 the ritual came to me.
The event was pitched as an artist meet-up at Tepco Beach, a quirky place that used to be a dumping ground for a ceramics factory. It is littered with cracked cups and bowls, the ideal setting for a treasure hunt. We were given a list of prompts and told to collect pieces we’d turn into a mosaic.
This was my kind of weird. The group spread out and crunched over broken shards, and I gravitated toward the aubergine seaweed stuck to blush ceramics, compelled by a color palette more than anything else. The wild fennel beckoned. It has been my friend this year, the first time I’ve noticed it growing around the area. The newly dried fronds matched my vibe, so I grabbed a few sprigs.
“All right, make your mosaic,” our leader called out. I stared at the pile, playing around, stacking pieces to reconstruct a mug, still not sure what it was. As I set a handle a few inches away from the base of the cup, I realized I was making the prompt “something broken.” In the process of kintsugi, this is the before, when what was once whole is shattered, covered with rust and algae, tumbled by the waves, and decaying.
This is before the healing when things are not as they should be.
As I placed each shard on the rock, I thought of the broken parts of my life—relationships with more distance than I ever thought possible, my body beginning to show signs of age, and the realities of the world that crack my heart every day. Each piece laid, remembered, honored, an unexpected homage to what’s wrong.
Well, I can’t say I’ve done this before.
I felt a few tears form as my hands tucked the final bits of fennel and sea moss into the piece. I laughed at myself—of course, I would be crying, and of course, I would be trying to make my memorial to the broken beautiful.
And yet, oddly, it was.
A few artists remained on the beach, and we shared about our mosaics. One said of mine, “It’s like the story of the kintsugi master holding each fragment and beholding the broken before the repair. The beholding is part of it too.”
The beholding is part of it too. Oh, how I don’t want this to be true. Oh, how I’d like to move on, quickly through the grief, into the healing, preferably to a glorious surprise ending no one sees coming. Give me all the redemption stories, baby! As much as I long for and fight for those stories, this was not that day.
This was not a day to be put back together with gold. This was a day to honor the fragments and let them be.
I left everything on the beach, knowing the pieces would be scattered and windswept by the end of the day. Nothing was fixed, but I was lighter somehow.
For everything, a season.
Even this.
Even this.
A Ritual of Your Own:
You don’t have to go to a beach of broken ceramics, but if you want to try this practice, here is a way to start.
1: Name the decay:
Reflection Questions: What isn’t working? What decay can I not prevent? What is ruptured or cracked? What do I need to release?
Name the brokenness impacting you, both collectively and individually. All of us hold different shards, and all of us wonder what else will crack in the coming year.
2: Behold the broken:
Honor what you’ve named with a ritual that fits you—make art, burn something, gather a few friends and give it a toast, go for a walk, play a song.
If you need a devastating tune, I heard the artist play this at a show a few weeks ago and it wrecked me: The End. Look how I am embracing the melancholy, people! If you aren’t in a melancholy place, and need a dance party, try Where Do Broken Hearts Go. I forgot what a jam it is, and how Whitney heals us all.
3: Listen to your life:
Every season brings different work. Some of the work of autumn is the work of letting go, knowing what is not ours to fix. In other seasons, there may be the work of grief, curling in and being silent, of spring cleaning, repair, and risking to bud again, or the work of celebration and letting ourselves experience joy.
Some of my favorite questions are: “What’s mine to do?” And “What’s not mine to do right now?” Give yourself a chunk of time alone to sit in the quiet and listen. I’m always surprised by what I hear.
I’d love to hear if you try the ritual or your thoughts on autumn.
Or connect with me on Instagram: @jackieknapp_
Beautiful. The claw marks quote 🥹 fellow inertia girl over here that doesn’t like change but has learned the beauty- for the taking- awaiting beyond the here and now
I love how you think, especially about the things I don’t usually think about.