No Lies for Autumn

We’re a few days into autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’ve been listening for what this season is asking of me.

The turning of a season marks time, yes. It also changes the way we tend our lives. The air cools. We bring in wood for the fire. We eat differently because our bodies need different things. We pay attention to the land we steward, whether that’s a small patch outside the front door or several acres.

These changes remind me that we aren’t islands unto ourselves. We live in constant relationship with the weather, the land, the people around us, the planets, and the movement of the Earth around the sun. A season doesn’t change somewhere out there while we remain untouched.

At this point in my life as a priestess and a Witch, I listen for what each threshold asks. The answer is never only about the leaves changing color. It comes from everything meeting at once: the weather, the astrological moment, the work I’m tending, the woman I am as I approach 55. All of it makes a particular alchemy.

And what I keep hearing this autumn is: shed the lies.

What would it look like to spend the next three months telling the truth? I mean the lies we tell other people, and the ones we tell ourselves so quickly we barely notice.

Someone asks how you are. “I’m fine,” you say, and the conversation moves on. Maybe you aren’t fine. Maybe fine lets you skip across a moment you don’t have time, or don’t feel safe enough, to enter.

Someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do. You say yes. Someone asks if you like something. You agree because everyone else seems to. Or you tell yourself you’ll be okay with a situation you already know is hurting you. I’m not asking us to turn every casual exchange into a confession. I am asking us to notice when we leave ourselves behind. Could you say no when the answer is no? Could you admit, even privately, “I’m not okay,” “I regret this,” or “I don’t want the life this choice is building”? We have good reasons for learning to move past the truth. Our days demand speed. There are bills to pay, work to finish, people depending on us. We push through discomfort in the name of productivity and money. We avoid conflict, the repair that might follow it, and the feelings that would slow us down. Sometimes we numb ourselves just enough to keep going. That numbing asks us to lie.

A while ago, I posted a reel asking what if the point of witchcraft isn’t spellcraft or getting everything we want. What if the point is to live? To be present for the life actually happening, with whatever is true in the moment, and to respond to it as the relational beings we are.

That way of living would change our pace. It would be inconvenient as hell. We chose the path of the Witch knowing, at some level, that we were stepping outside a system that runs counter to nature and life. And still, we have to survive inside that system. I know what it costs to pay the rent or mortgage, to keep a business going, to make another thing and put it on Instagram because something has to sell.

Part of my work as a priestess is to keep returning to a more natural rhythm, to stay open enough to be in dialogue with the truth of what is. Motherfucker, it’s hard. Everything around me pushes me to do the opposite.

I’m approaching 55, and I think about death more than I used to. Not morbidly. Honestly. I don’t want to spend more of this precious life pretending so I can skate across an uncomfortable conversation or rush past an experience because there’s a bill to send and a mortgage to pay.

I used to tell you I wasn’t asking you to burn your life down. I was asking you to try a little bit.

I’m less sure of that now. I am asking something of all of us that might change the shape of our lives. I’m asking us to get courageous enough to stop building them around what we know isn’t true. That doesn’t erase the bills or make the consequences simple. I know. But I also know what it costs to keep abandoning the truth of who we are.

As the full moon in Aries approaches, I’m thinking about the I Am. Who are you when you stop answering out of obligation? What have you committed to that your true self no longer wants? What does that self want to be doing with this life?

We may not know the whole answer yet. This autumn, we can begin by noticing the next lie before it leaves our mouths. We can pause long enough to feel what’s true.

Can you stop lying? Can I?

That’s the work.