Nine fruits and nine flavors to preserve my soul
in peace this day...
— Caitlín Matthews
I'm enjoying Joanna Powell Colbert's 30 Days of Harvest ecourse. This week, one of the photo prompts was about savoring autumn fruits. While thoughts of apples were also on my mind, I took the prompt metaphorically and went for a walk with my baby to identify nine “flavors” of autumn in my own back yard.
Persimmon for patience,
raspberry for reflection,
dogwood for dreams,
rose for enchantment,
aster for starshine,
polk for color,
oak for mystery,
and cucumber for salad.
Okay, so that’s only eight, because the ninth is those cute kids in the middle of my collage who have been wanting to buy boxes of international snacks online. My husband went to Big Lots and got them a box of snacks from Germany, Italy, Peru, China, Turkey, England, and the U.S. I think we’re also going to call this a homeschooling win!
For my pictures of the nine autumn flavors, the persimmon is what I went after first, remembering how this time last year I was very pregnant and climbed around in ditches and over fences collecting them in my quest for persimmon cookies. My husband said the other day, “the way to know persimmons are ripe is when they’re all gone.” There is stiff competition from the animals for these little fruits.
This exercise also brought to mind the “nine powers of nine flowers” prompt from 30 Days of May. I can hardly believe it is already fall. I also feel like during September and October I should apparently change my name to “Rosepriestess,” because I cannot stop taking pictures of them...
My new book, Earthprayer, Birthprayer, Lifeprayer, Womanprayer has been released. This poetry collection is one of the results of my committed, devotional, year-long woodspriestess practice. I maintained this practice throughout 2013, eventually spending approximately 330 days that year in the same place in the woods listening to what they had to tell me about life, myself, and the Earth.