This year the Harvest Moon was on September 17th and the upcoming Autumnal Equinox lands on Sunday, September 22nd 2024.
Last year at Autumn Equinox, I buried my stone from my Vancouver Island home in Evi’s garden under a rosemary bush near Zaros on the Island of Crete. It was a private ceremony within the community ritual. My dear sisters in the Avocado Sisterhood now continue to meet virtually every few weeks, catching up with each other’s personal lives, and reminiscing about our incredible spiritual experience during our COVID quarantine last year in Greece.
It is Autumnal Equinox. Five women gather equidistant apart beneath a giant avocado tree in the garden at Evi’s place near the village of Zaros. This little hamlet is under the watchful loving eye of Psiloritis (Mount Idi) on the Island of Crete in Greece. We leave the solitude of our individual cottages where we have been quarantined to co-create an Autumnal Equinox ritual I have initiated for this occasion. Since we are still testing positive for COVID, we maintain our distance. I have a nasty strain as I’m exhausted, foggy, my nose bleeds, and I’m coughing so much my head hurts. Still … this ritual is important as our morale seriously needs a boost. We are dubbed the five “Corona Sisters” or the “COVID Girls” whose Goddess Pilgrimage on Crete was cut short when we contracted the virus somewhere between our homes in Australia, Canada and the United States, and our arrival in Heraklion a few short days ago. We have renamed ourselves the “Avocado Sisterhood” to acknowledge the blessing of our togetherness, and we represent a quarter of the women participating in Carol Christ’s Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete in 2023.
When I begin with a yoga practice, I am unaware that beautifully sensitive Summer is a yoga teacher so I muddle through attempting to centre us and set our intention. I ask the women to face the four directions as I call in assistance from corresponding earth, air, fire and water. It is now that we begin to feel the visceral love of Mother Mountain as we gaze at Her. I have prepared an invocation of the Divine Feminine for each woman, synthesizing their unique offering and challenge. Our spiritual elder Faye and our delightfully funny Doreen bring steadiness and laughter. We have each brought a stone which was meant to be used during a ritual on one of the many Goddess Pilgrimage excursions we are now missing. Over our weeks together, it gradually dawns on us that we are incredibly blessed to be spiritually united and able to come together every day under the avocado tree for our daily ritual.
On Crete last year, ritual saved our morale, grounded us in ways nothing else could. Why? In a world that feels de-stabilized, we yearn for consistency and steadiness. During our personal struggles, our community challenges, and the turbulent times in our country and our world, we can feel off kilter. If the personal or private is political, feminists can use their spiritual practices to centre themselves for the necessary social justice work to be done. The micro within the macro suggests we can strengthen ourselves in solo ceremonies or communal ones for the work of the larger world.
Since I am syncretist, and gifted at synthesis, I teach in my practice a variety of spiritual activities and rituals. The women I serve have an array of options. Syncretism in my world is the overlap in the Venn diagram of all global religious traditions. Where they overlap in my world is love. If it is of love, it is included. If it is not, it is left to the outer edges.
For your own Autumnal Equinox ritual this year, you may choose to begin as I do by collecting chestnuts, beautiful leaves, acorns, and pine cones.
I invite you to consider how leaves are teaching you to let go. As an important spiritual practice, non-attachment can be freeing from the power of clinging and holding on. Let it go. Now. Coinciding with this practice, I invite you to consider what to release that is no longer serving you; something that may in fact be holding you back or weighing you down. Release it. Now. Since Equinox is always a time of balancing the Light, consider how to bring balance into your life as we head toward Winter.
Finally, to close your ritual, consider preparing for your ‘gathering in’ time to come soon. The darkness increases, the wind lifts the dry leaves, and nostalgia for past autumns is bittersweet. It is a good time to plant some garlic or some bulbs as you bury your own seeds for self-hood emerging in the coming spring.
I would love to know how you plan to celebrate the Autumn Equinox this year, so feel free to share with me and others in the Tea with Terry Community on Facebook or Instagram, in the comments section of this blogpost, or on this story as published on Feminism and Religion.
In light,
Terry
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