"Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and 
     gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim       
     fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky 
turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     Today, in the northern hemisphere, is the first day of autumn:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining in the night; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.

     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.

     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, it's good to meditate on beginnings, and it's good to remember the ubiquity of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the security of an orderly world.
     And it's good to note that even though this security can at times be unnerving, even frightening, it is at the same time beautiful, a living picture of the endless grace of our creator God.  We change, the world changes, but God does not.  In autumn's changes, we see even more the necessity of his presence.