Sukkot

http://www.virginia.edu/jewishstudies/images/sukkot_ancient.jpg  

We are now into the first day of the Jewish festival of Sukkot, which began last night and continues for nine days.  A festival of harvest and celebration, Sukkot commemorates the waiting of the Israelites in the desert for their entrance to the Promised Land.  Observant Jews build Sukkahs -- little huts, reminisicent of the mobile huts the Jews lived in as they wandered the desert for 40 years -- outside their homes and eat their meals in their Sukkahs, where they are able to see the sky during the holiday.  

For me, a Christian teaching in a Jewish school, Sukkot has largely meant some extended time off from work to catch up on all the preparation that I should have done over the summer.  (And, this year, to sleep away at least yesterday -- I did get the miserable virus that kept my daughter out of school last week.)  But this year, Sukkot has delivered a new fragment of enlightenment.  

Several people have been writing about the melancholy that they feel with the coming of autumn.  I haven't addressed that, because it's not what I feel, and I've been wondering why.  I have experienced three major life-shattering experiences in my 51 years, each of them with never-ending ripple effects, and each of them had its beginning in October.  And yet, autumn is truly my favorite season, and October my favorite month.  How could that be?  I should be ripping the month of October from the calendar and refusing to acknowledge its existence on anything that has to be dated.   

What occurred to me, as I thought about Sukkot this year, is that, regardless of and despite my personal experiences, insignificant in the vast millenia of human activity, autumn is a time of communal gathering in and harvest, a time of Thanksgiving for the nourishing and life-saving qualities of food and water, and a time of hope in things unseen, as we see the earth put itself to bed in anticipation of the long dark and cold of winter. In winter, we can only wait with foolish optimism for longer days of light and the first green shoots to poke through earth so cold and muddy that it looks as if couldn't support a single living thing, but in autumn the colors of the trees and fields remind us to celebrate.   

I'm sure that this recognition comes from my childhood.  We lived in the country and for four generations my family ran a grain business.  Since it involved the selling of seed and fertilizer and the buying of harvests to be sold to larger markets, I didn't know much about farming itself.  No one in my family put in so much as a vegetable garden, and our only animals were dogs and cats (and, for awhile, the pigeon named Cat).  But we lived in the midst of farms, with corn and soy beans and cows and sheep growing all around us.  In the late summer, a trip to the grocery in town would mean being stuck in the long lines of trucks bringing corn in to sell.  The only real whole-town celebration during the calendar year was the Fall Festival, with the main intersection blocked off for rides and booths.  My father and uncle put in 18 and 20 hour days in October as the beans came in, complained all through November when rain brought things to a standstill, and went back to work feverishly later in the winter, when the ground again became hard enough for the machinery to get into the fields.  

I always thought that I liked the autumn because it was the beginning of a new school year, with all the crispness and promise that that entails.  But now I see things differently.  Autumn is a time for working together, whether in an ancient movement toward a promised land or a contemporary harvesting of food for the winter and seed for the spring.  In either case, it is a time of great industry and hopefulness.  And so far, no matter how desperately out-of-kilter the month of October has sometimes been, its yellows and reds have always been too brief.   

Walked: 3 miles.

Walked this month: 61.3 miles

Walked since beginning journal: 502 miles.