Mabon Reflections

By Kelly Hansen Maher


The autumnal equinox, when celebrated as Mabon, is the second of three harvest festivals. Before, at summer’s peak, we celebrated the first of the three. We blessed the loaf and the sweet corn, we enjoyed fresh peaches and ripe berries. Tonight marks the end of summer and the start of autumn. As an equinox, Mabon is a “hinge” Sabbat, when we continue to enjoy our immediate, golden bounty, but we also start to preserve, can, and store, in preparation for winter.

These days, I’ll be out apple picking. In a bumper-crop year like this, I’ll scoop up dozens of dropped apples and try to keep up with the tree. Birds and insects will pierce the apple skins, expose the seed-stars, and take up the job of passage. This year, too, black walnuts from the neighbor’s tree, enclosed in their heavy green balls, fall on our heads as we leave the driveway. We crush them with our cars and make messes. Acorns are falling by the gallon, and I rake them up, add them to the compost.

The plants have many animal helpers—like us, like squirrels and birds—whose industry assists the release and journey of the seed. Even when we harvesters try to preempt rot and preserve what is too tender to last, we are in good relation with the earth. We take what we can, so that we may nourish ourselves in times of scarcity. But we couldn’t possibly take it all. And so the wheel turns.

Equinox means equal night. The autumnal equinox, specifically, means that night’s minutes, hours will begin to overtake day’s and will do so more rapidly than at any other time of year. The earth, too, shifts from production to storage. Mold, rot, and decay will soon move over our gardens and fields, as we tilt ever closer to the next and final harvest celebration, and the death rites of Samhain.

But tonight, we perch. What if we enact the natural forces of Mabon in our own lives? Earth’s seeds, having reached peak potency, are ready to disperse. Once separated from their parent plants, they will embed anew; but it is a long wait to their next form. What must you cast off from? Also: what carries you? Do you hang on the wind, attach yourself to another’s passage, or fall directly to soil?

Shook loose, we are aloft, adrift, we hitchhike, we migrate. Like the word cleave—which can mean to attach as well as to sever, we can meet the equinox both ways. And then we launch, with the new season, into something else. Just for this time, though, can we suspend, outside of form, and honor the sacred carry?