presents:

a mabon plaid

Autumn is a good time for visiting;

During its short days there is work for all...

There are sweet acorns in the high woods,

Cornstalks are kind over the brown earth.

~ancient Irish poem of the seasons (translated by Caitlin Matthews)

A very blessed Mabon all,

The air is cool and the summer is set like the sun in the west.  The birds have begun to migrate, their songs fleeting as they pass over and make their way towards their winter homes.  The harvest has come, the vine has withered and dried.  Seeds are now being stowed and the pace of life seems to have changed.  The days are shorter, and the night lays a heavy dew with frost soon to come.  Everywhere the earth takes in the last rays of light, gathering to itself a blanket of color.  It speaks to me, and I feel it within me.  These most beautiful blue skies tempered against the radiant colored hills.  The ways a leaf turns, readies to float down to the ground, shivered loose by the winds.  A gentle hand seems to pluck them from their parent and send them on their way.  This is the Autumn Time, when pumpkins glow bright- warding away negativity in the deepest darkest night.  When our ancestors feel so close as we are reminded of their lives.  So close they seem, as if only a whisper will bring them back again.  And they are there I assure you that.  Unseen perhaps but not unfelt.  Mabon, the divine youth, has come to age and drink the wine of wisdom.  The shadowed time, where we are all reminded of our mortality and humanity.  Gathering to us the fruits of spring’s planting and summer’s growth.  

The Autumnal Equinox has been seen as a time when daylight would fade quickly into the gloomy mists of frost and coming snows.  It signaled a time to quickly gather our stores and give  tribute to those who have passed into the shadowy realms of the Otherworld.  This is a time when Mabon, a celebrated lost son, would die and be grieved for.  Like the seasons, his life mirrored the year and how it was celebrated within the clans of the Great Mothers.  In the Goddess's beautiful harvest, the sun falls at the midway mark, halfway between midsummer and midwinter.  We become thankful that much of the work is now behind us with gathering the crops, but mindful that there is still much to come.  Shadows deepen as the light turns across our back, the earth lays down for a long rest and the world around us mirrors the deep reflection of aging.  The crone enters her time with wisdom and introspection, she sends us into a plaid of colors, whispering to us gently her secrets and to honor life and death.  The cycles have their own way of making us aware of how deep this time truly is, when we are able to take a look around us with slow long walks through the countryside and feel Her very presence working with each frost touched flower.

 A very blessed Mabon to you all.

 Remember the wisdom and the courage we bring into this time, when we face our fears and prepare for the long winter that leads to rebirth. 

Young son to the Great Mother,

trinity of days to pick the berries or else the fey to claim,

Sweet Goddess who now enters the crone wheel

it is proper to adorn the headstones of rebirth

to balance the darkness and the light

upon a sacred space for ancient rites.

~Autumn Laird

Pax Vobiscum

Alwyn

Mabon Rain

By Autumn Laird

September 18, 2003

Soft rain

Lift me up

Pick me up

Green my edges

Fill them full of sound

Pattering and streaking down

Drinking deep

Thinking deep

Roots take hold

Soak my dry brittle bones

Make life flourish again

Skeletal leaves dancing on air

Flittering down to the ground so bare

To cover it in a blanket before snow

Acorns drop as the wind shutters

Loose they let gravity take them

Some may seed some may feed

Orange sky alight by the blazon hills

Trees turning as if fire-licked by the sun

Mabon now comes

My heart aches with the changes

But the beauty in seasonal death still stuns

The smell wraps around me

Welcoming memories

It urges me to lie down in a pile of leaves

To breathe deep the feast

Take rest in the harvest of bounty

Remember the joys and the sorrows

Lighting candles in my mind

To honor time

And the cycles I live by

Cool rains ushering fall

The water flows in a pattern

Down soft pools and dips

Finding its way to the roots within

Channeling through the maze

Walking the dark paths within

To find the light of the fire burning

Lighting the way