In the vibrancy of seasonal change, nature reminds us that our richest time of life is when we become seed-bearers.
I turned seventy this year. The number is so inconceivable to me that I almost whisper it in my own head.
How did I get here is the constant question we all ask when we hit a milestone year.
Where did the time go?
I know why the number rattles me. When I think of seventy, I picture my grandparents, long since passed away, spending their last years in daylight slumber on Florida beaches, oiled skin shriveling under the hot sun.
I think of the wheelchair bound residents of nursing homes slowly meandering the halls to get to their daily entertainment of meals.
Oh, wait. That’s my mother who just turned ninety-two, still buzzing down those institutional highways with determination.
There’s a big gap between seventy and ninety-two, I remind myself. I once overheard a woman in a conversation with another friend describe someone as “not young, young and not old, old.” This is how seventy feels. Not young and not old. At the end of youthfulness and at the foothills of elderhood. Not the seventy of my grandparents’ or even my parents’ eras, but not the “new fifty” that marketers and internet influencers like to proclaim. It’s really a kind of edge time and edge times are always transitional. Times of letting go and stepping forward into something new much like the fall season that’s now deepening its embrace.
sit here at my dining room table looking out over the meadow that grows wild in my suburban neighborhood. It’s now turned from succulent shades of green to yellow, gold, and brittle, spent brown.
I’m unapologetically a “green” girl. I eagerly watch for the first tiny, unfurling leaves of spring and feel my spirits lift when tulips bloom and trees are bathed in a green so fresh it seems to be a color especially reserved for rebirth. The green season can last for six months or more in the right conditions providing a welcome respite from winter’s always-too-long stay.
And there’s the fact that the green season is one of growth while fall is the season of dying, wilting, decaying.
Yet the autumnal colors challenge me to look at the withering time as the richest, the one that holds the future in its roots and falling leaves.
The Seed-bearing Season
Fall walks are always the most fruitful when it comes to gathering objects. I collect these nature cast-offs for making mandalas and pretty assemblages which I started doing when we were holed up in our homes as Covid spread a somber pall around the world.
The gathering and making draws me into a state of mindfulness: I don’t work towards a result, but to immerse in the process. Completely focused in the moment, my thinking mind quiets and little bits of insight and revelation drift in. Some will become new essays to write; some will ease my concerns about an issue gnawing at me. Some will simply make me pause and reflect.
The bounty I have harvested comes mostly from the fall months: pinecones, acorns, horse chestnuts, staghorn sumac, milkweed pods, and baskets full of colored leaves that I press to preserve.
Sorting through my boxes, I’m reminded of how most of these objects are seed bearers. The acorns and chestnuts will be greedily stocked and stored by the squirrels; eaten they will add to the fat layer of the deer who make their home in the increasingly sparse woods that are disappearing under bulldozers and backhoes. The milkweed pods will split open, their feather-tipped seeds caught on the wind to take root in distant fields, growing into a future nursery for monarch butterflies.
Even the leaves that I love so much in their greenery will decay and turn to mulch, fertilizing the soil for the next grasses of spring to emerge, bright and soft under my bare feet.
Autumn, in fact, is a season of nature’s greatest richness. A season of seed bearing. Sun and water and soil have succored every tree and plant with nutrients; some to subsist on and some that will be stored in the reserves of its seeds. When they drop or are spread by wildlife, these seeds continue a cycle of birth from death; spring’s green leaves from autumn’s golden release.
Nature, as always, urges me to pay attention and learn from its wisdom. What seeds do I bear?
At seventy, I have absorbed decades of living; taken detours and well-planned journeys. I have faced challenges and overcome them. I’ve learned how to shut off the distraction of my thoughts and be still. I watch the seasons change with less trepidation and more gratitude.
Autumn tells me this: I’m a seed bearer. Not decaying, but ripening so that my cache of wisdom and experience can be shared to nourish others’ journeys. Now is the time of life for me to sort through my cache and choose what has been most valuable and begin planting. Not so much like the deliberate planting of seeds and bulbs that happens in spring, but the broad and generous shedding of fall when we trust the seeds to be gathered by the wind, birds, bees, and deer, and planted where they are needed. Maybe to re-grow a forest dissipated by disease or fire. Or re-wild a meadow stripped of its native flora for massive data centers. Autumn simply lets go, exuberantly, in splendor and vibrant color, fueling the next cycle; the next generation of trees, flowers, and berry-laden bushes.
In this new cycle of life, autumn asks me to put on my brightest colors. To celebrate the jam-packed seeds of my wisdom that have been nourished over a lifetime and let them go.
I like to imagine it will take me another two decades (at least) to distribute these nuggets. Along the way will come more lessons: times to apply my hard-earned experience and times to learn something new. Like nature, I’m entering a season that invites awe and appreciation. It is the cup of overflowing cider. The warmth of crackling bonfires. The breath-taking golds, scarlets, and ambers that blanket the hills. It is the season of glorious splendor and it calls to me to wear it like Joseph’s coat of many colors as I dance into the years ahead.
Elle Harrigan is a self-described “nature shaman” and Certified Intuition Practitioner (CIP) who writes frequently on the intersection of nature mindfulness and unleashing inner wisdom. You can find her online at livingwildwisdom.com.