Falling Leaves Intentions

I love the idea of using falling leaves to transfer your intentions into the world– they will fall and decompose and take your message to the soil and the roots. We wrote right on leaves still on the tree and check back every few days to see if they’ve fallen yet.

I always struggled to connect with Samhain. Even as a kid I never liked spooky stories and scary decorations. As I’ve gotten older several important people in my life have passed away this time of year and I always seem to find myself feeling down in late October.

The place where I finally did connect with ideas of death and rebirth was through composting as a seasonal metaphor. You collect all of the spent dead things and through their passing you make new life. Soil is millions of years of organic matter giving life to the next generation. Soil itself is such a powerful symbol of this season– the bones of the earth.

Shifting my thinking away from loss and grief and instead to gathering materials to support new life has been a game changer. Celebrating the falling of the leaves and the new soil that they will make with our intentions is a great way to honor that!

This hardly needs a tutorial– just write your intentions or wishes on some leaves still on a tree and then wait for them to fall naturally, releasing your wish into the world bit literally and figuratively!

I observe the wheel of the year because the cycle of the seasons make sense to me. Observing all the small changes in nature is it’s own secular kind of “religion.” It’s full of wonder and small celebrations. That said I have always struggled to connect with Samhain/ Halloween/ All Hallows’ Even as a kid I never liked spooky stories and scary decorations. (I was the kid who’s mom ruined spooky stories for the class…) As I’ve gotten older several important people in my life have passed away this time of year and I always seem to find myself dwelling on my grief in late October. I haven’t managed to make an ancestor supper because it still makes me sad.

In an attempt to move past my October funk I spent some time researching the holiday and traditions more thoroughly and came across a passage talking about composting as a seasonal metaphor. This is the first time I really connected with the holiday- you collect all of the spent dead things and through their passing you make new life. I was too fixated on the first part of the equation and not enough on the second, the new life that eventually comes.