Spiritual Growth This Fall
I want to begin with something I observed in a monastery in Bhutan in my early thirties, because it has taken me the better part of two decades to understand what I was actually seeing. It was October, the harvest season in the high valleys, a time when the agricultural communities were completing the work that would determine whether they ate well or poorly through the winter, and the monks had organised their contemplative practice around the season in a way that I found, at the time, merely interesting. The intensity of the sitting periods increased. The teaching sessions became less frequent and the silent periods longer. The abbot, when I managed a conversation through our mutual interpreter, said something that my interpreter rendered as, this is the season when the mind that has been scattered through the summer returns to itself.
I have been teaching in colleges and universities for nearly twenty years now, and I have watched something very similar happen to my students every autumn term. Whatever they have been doing through the summer, travelling, working, existing in that particular state of pleasant cognitive diffusion that long days and warm weather seem to encourage, there is a quality of attention that returns in September/October that is genuinely different from what was available before. The question I want to explore in this piece is whether that quality of attention is something we can work with intentionally, as a resource for genuine spiritual development, rather than simply noting it with vague appreciation before the demands of the season absorb it.
The cross-cultural evidence for autumn as a season of heightened contemplative possibility is, I would argue, considerably stronger than is usually acknowledged in the spirituality literature, which tends toward the vernal, new beginnings, spring, the obvious symbolism of growth and emergence. But the traditions that have thought most carefully about the relationship between the natural world and the inner life have frequently identified the autumn as the more productive season for the particular kind of inner work that produces genuine transformation rather than merely pleasant experience.
Tibetan Buddhism & "Rigpa"
The Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which I spent considerable time studying in both its Himalayan and its diaspora forms, understands the autumn as the season in which the mind's natural clarity, its "rigpa", in the Dzogchen vocabulary, is most readily accessible. The summer's warmth and diffusion give way to a quality of air and light that the tradition associates with wakefulness rather than sleep, with precision rather than vagueness. The contemplative manuals I worked through during my time in Bhutan and later in Dharamsala are quite specific about this i.e., autumn is the season for the practices that require the most concentrated and most sustained attention, because the season itself is doing a portion of the work of gathering the mind that would otherwise have to be done entirely by the practitioner.
The Sufi tradition offers a different but complementary perspective. In the poetry of Rumi, and I use the poetry as a window into a theological position rather than as decoration, autumn is consistently the season of honest self-examination, of the soul's willingness to look clearly at what it actually is rather than what it hopes or imagines itself to be. The falling of the leaves is not, in Rumi's symbolic vocabulary, primarily a symbol of death. It is a symbol of the soul's willingness to release what is no longer living, the pretensions, the accumulated identifications, the things we carry because we have always carried them rather than because they continue to serve any genuine purpose. The tree is not diminished by losing its leaves. It is, in some sense, clarified.
Mysticism & The Question Of Purpose"
The question of purpose, which is the specific question this season seems most naturally to provoke, is one that I think requires considerable care in how it is framed. The contemporary spiritual marketplace tends to treat purpose as something one discovers, as though it were a fixed object waiting to be found in the right workshop or the right practice or the right book. The traditions I have spent my career studying are considerably less confident about this. What they tend to suggest, with a consistency that I find genuinely persuasive across quite different cultural and theological frameworks, is that purpose is not discovered but recognised, and that recognition is possible only when the noise of the summer's accumulated activity has sufficiently subsided for something quieter to be heard.
This is the specific gift of autumn as a contemplative season. The natural world is doing something in October that mirrors, with extraordinary precision, what the inner life requires in order to become legible to itself. The deciduous trees are releasing everything that was produced in the service of the light season. The days are shortening. The pace of growth is slowing. There is a quality of drawing-in, of return to the essential, that the season makes available as a kind of external support for the internal process that genuine self-examination requires. In Japan, the tradition of koyo, the aesthetic contemplation of autumn leaves, is not merely an occasion for appreciating natural beauty, though it is certainly that. It is understood as a practice: the deliberate, attentive witnessing of the beauty of impermanence as a form of philosophical and spiritual education. You are not simply looking at leaves. You are practising the recognition of what is genuinely present and genuinely passing simultaneously.
Practical Spiritual Steps this Fall
What does this mean practically, for someone who is neither a Tibetan monk nor a Sufi poet but a person navigating a busy modern life with a genuine interest in using this season well? I have found, both in my own practice and in the conversations I have with students and colleagues who take these questions seriously, that the most useful autumn practice is considerably simpler than most of the spiritual literature suggests. It begins with a single, honest question, asked not rhetorically but with genuine curiosity and genuine willingness to sit with an unsatisfying answer: what, in the past year, has actually mattered? Not what should have mattered. Not what I told other people mattered. Not what I spent the most time on, which is rarely a reliable guide to what was genuinely significant. What, when I look back with the particular quality of honest attention that the season seems to support, actually moved me, actually developed me, actually connected me to something I recognise as genuine in myself? The answer to this question, asked honestly and sat with patiently, is usually more specific and more surprising than one anticipates. And it is, in my experience, the closest thing to a reliable indicator of purpose that any of the traditions I have studied have managed to produce.
The abbot in Bhutan was describing something real when he said that autumn is the season when the mind that has been scattered through the summer returns to itself. Every contemplative tradition I have spent serious time with recognises some version of this return. The season is not doing the work for you. But it is, if you are willing to work with it rather than simply through it, offering something that is considerably harder to access in other seasons i.e, a quality of natural quieting that makes the quieter things audible. Purpose, in my experience, is one of the quieter things. Autumn, handled well, is the season most likely to let you hear it.