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All summer long the little clay goddess has stood in the good, brown earth of the garden.

All summer long she has watched over the waxing of the crops.

Now, standing in a bowl of seed wheat, she presides over the Harvest Supper.

(On Midwinter's Eve we will eat this self-same wheat, made sweet with honey, rich with almonds and poppy seed, perfumed with rose water, from this very bowl.)

And when the last bite has been taken, the last toast poured, she will go to her bed in the storage cupboards, with the fruits of summer all around her.

It is a great pleasure in the life of an artist to be able to share one's vision with the world. The internet and online libraries are a lot of fun, but being able to showcase one's work in a place where people can come and view it in person is so much better. This September has kept me super busy as I have had three shows, all opening in the same week. 

The image that heads this blog is my "wall" of art from Cheyney University's faculty art exhibition. I had created a number of canvases this summer for a solo exhibition, ranging in size from 11" x 14" to 30" x 40," and all of those were headed to a show in Wilmington, Delaware (more on these shortly). one of my colleagues was dumbfounded when I told her I wasn't sure I'd have work for the faculty show. "What about those hundreds of Goddess drawings you've been doing," she asked. I was a little stuck. I did indeed have hundreds of drawings as part of my "Goddess a Day" project, however, they were small, on paper, and would have to be framed.

It's the morning of the Autumn Equinox.

The kitty is playing with something, up and down the hall.

Clacketta clacketta clacketta.

What is that damn cat playing with now? I wonder.

Turns out, it's a jelly bean.

It is so amazing watching a vision become real.  And in our case, it starts in the dirt.  The place has been chosen and cleared for the Goddess Salmona’s Shrine.

Equinox

Since I can remember, my mom has had two small corn husk dolls. I’m not sure where or why she got them, but it was before I was born, so they’ve always been there, through all my family’s moves from city to city, country to country. Even now, they’re nestled among other knick-knacks in the enormous Bavarian schrank my parents keep in their formal living room. They are quaint, dainty little things, and they’ve always held a kind of mystery to me that, for a long time, I couldn’t quite pin down.

As an adult, I learned that corn husk dolls originated among the Iroquois, and the tradition was picked up by European settlers who had similar traditions. In some ways, corn husk dolls are the indigenous American cognate to European corn dollies, which are usually not so much “dolls” as we think of them as they are decorative objects taking a variety of shapes: hearts, handbells, lanterns, horseshoes, to name just a handful. Another difference is that corn dollies are often made of wheat, barley, or oat sheaves, not the ears of maize used to craft corn husk dolls.

We hope you enjoyed the autumn equinox! Over at Witches&Pagans the equinox caught us a little flat-footed but we’ve made sure to collect all our content relating to it all the same.

Celebrated throughout many cultures as either the midpoint or beginning of autumn (also known as fall), the autumn equinox is the point at which the balance of daylight and night shifts from the exuberance of summer to the darkness of winter. In the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth, this time has come though in the Southern Hemisphere the opposite is happening: the days are now getting brighter!

Here’s all the content we’ve gathered, including not only all our relevant posts from the last month, but also others from outside websites we thought you might appreciate. Enjoy!

--Aryós Héngwis