This morning felt like Autumn. Even though there's another week before the season officially turns, the air has the scent of Autumn, the trees are starting to wear russet shades, the sky darkens to pewter noticably earlier each evening, shadows are getting longer and rosehips swell like fat red jewels in the hedgerows. All these things act as Zeitgeber to my biological temporal rhythms and I can feel myself becoming attuned to the approaching season.

The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness always brings a sense of free-floating wistfulness for me. It's a sepia-tinted and haunted time of year. And yet I also find it strangely comforting and warm. it's the season when I feel most attuned to the earth and nature and the living things around me. While I might sometimes be melancholy and reflect on a year ending and how little was achieved therein, there is also much I love and look forward to about this turn of the great Cosmic Wheel.

♥ The mist lying curled in the valley like a huge white cat

♥ The scent of woodsmoke

♥ Dancing through eddies of autumn leaves and kicking them in the air

♥ Roasted pumpkin, pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread....

♥ Silver birches with golden leaves

♥ Picking frosted sloes to make sloe gin

♥ Harvest festivals

♥ Bringing seed-heads and acorns and conkers home fom my walks

♥ Toasted crumpets piled with home-made cider apple butter

♥ Snuggly woollen sweaters and scarves

♥ The low deep golden light of late afternoons-early evenings