Autumn is my favorite season.

I love all of the seasons. They each offer me something the others don’t, and for that I am grateful because each season fuels my creativity in different ways. Summer time is when I spend the most amount of time out of doors; I hike, I camp, I spend time relaxing by the river or near a lake, I take to the woods, I go jogging. Summer is a season that I cherish. Sunshine and warm weather is uncommon for most of the year in the Pacific Northwest, so I enjoy it as much as I can.

Winter is a season I also love. I consider myself a child of snow. I’ve always loved the snow and I don’t mind being cold. Or rather, I mind being cold a lot less than I mind being hot. Winter is a season that fills me with content; there’s hot cocoa and Christmas lights and home baked cookies and pies and that frozen smell in the air that I am always haunted by in the best way. And spring is a season that fills me with restlessness; it’s a kind of recharged energy that makes me want to get back outside and revisit all the places I’ve had to miss over the winter months.

But autumn…it’s in my bones. I am a child of snow, yes, but I am autumn’s daughter. My birthday is in October and there isn’t a single day of autumn that I don’t feel the most alive and full and ready. Autumn is a season of rebirth, of harvest, of the blending of life and death. In paganism, All Hallows Eve (or Samhain) is believed to be the night of the year when the boundaries between the realm of the living and the realms of the dead are the most blurred. It’s truly the most haunted of seasons.

I love everything about autumn. I’m more inspired in autumn than any other season; I usually read and write more in autumn than in any other season; I feel a sense of belonging, an energy like coming home that I don’t feel at any other time of year, and I’m simply full of life, of life, of gratitude. Even last year as I was finalizing my divorce, the autumn months were a comfort to me. I was in pain almost everyday, I suffered acutely as I went through my divorce, but there was finally a voice deep down telling me that things weren’t as bad they seemed, that things would continue to improve, and that I could rely on the strength and beauty of the earth when I felt I had no strength of my own.

And I am already feeling this energy. Tomorrow is the first day of autumn and already today I’ve written four new poems. I’m completely on track with my essay. I’m nearly finished reading Pride and Prejudice. Once I finish it, I’ll move on to Mansfield Park. I’ve started reading a new book of poems (Peluda by Melissa Lozada-Olivia) and two new books on craft (The Art of the Poetic Line by James Logenbach and Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction edited by B.J. Hollars), and I am full of desire to consume as much as I can and write as much as I can.

I was worried, to be honest, about some of my plans for poetry writing over the rest of the year. As I said a couple posts ago, my goal for October is to write 10,000 words of new poetry and for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), my goal is to write 20,000-25,000 words of new poetry. I thought this would be an enormous undertaking at first, considering how little new poetry I’ve written since the semester started, but now I feel confident that I can get it done. And as I said in July when I was writing 20,000 words for Camp NaNoWriMo, even if I fall short, I will still have written new material and that is always a win.

But I am hoping to get this done as closely to my goals as possible. Next semester we’re working on our creative theses and I want to have as much material as I can to work with. And autumn is a time of harvest; I’ve planted seeds of poetry inside of me this whole year…now is when I glean their fruit.