AUTUMN

Shortly we can say that autumn is the time of focus and letting go at the same time. As you see the changes of nature during this period, you can recognize that this is the time of maturity and harvest. However, harvest always depends on what you've been growing and producing during the year,because obviously you can only reap what you saw. Following along the lines of nature, if we compare to summer we can sense that the climate changes drastically, energies start to decline and draw back, leaves turn to vivid and astonishing autumn colors, but only short lived so later they fall and die. The air becomes misty and heavy, and overall everything becomes more quiet and subdued.

Autumn in a sense is the counterpart of spring energies, so you can recognize a contrast between the growth of spring and letting go and dying of autumn. As spring was closely tied to planning and envisioning giving you a sense of purpose and direction, autumn is more about letting go of the old, leaving behind what's no longer needed.

It is important to understand that the focus of this period is not about losing things, people dear to us,  it's not a mindless death or an empty destruction. It is  rather about stripping down everything unnecessary until we find the real quality, until we find the essence of it.

Autumn belongs to Metal Element and a lot of the above represent the quality of Metal quite well. Of course Metal also, as all the Elements, have a lot of associations and these blog post series are far too short to encompass all of it, but let's again take one or two important aspects of Metal Element and expand on them.

If we are talking about letting go it's key to understand that the important part we should focus on is not about the things we get rid of, but the emphasis is on the things which we choose instead. Naturally committing and deciding to do something indeed means that we forgo most of the other things in our lives, but constantly thinking about all the things we cannot do will quickly lead us to a very unstable mental state starting a downward spiral really difficult to stop. If you think about it for a second it is obvious that there will always be more things you cannot do at a given time that you can do purely based on the limitations of the human experience (like most of us cannot be at 2 places at the same time). But this is not intended to be restricted, rather it is set to help us realize our true priorities.

By the time we arrive to this period of the year we clearly realize that the year will end soon and whatever plans we had, whatever things we wanted to do, it’s time to evaluate, because given the limited time left, we won't have enough time to do everything, so it is time to choose what our priorities are, what is important for us enough to keep and pursue for the rest of the year.

Metal can be very effective and extremely result oriented, and also a good strategist: understanding how to tackle something to get it done  is within the realm of Metal Element. Assessing realistically what can be done with evaluating the resources and time needed to accomplish that thing is one of the strength of this Element, because it can strip down and get rid of anything and everything which is not necessary to accomplish our objective, keeping in mind at the same time that this is only to benefit the fulfillment of this goal.