September 29, 2019. It’s a beautiful Sunday in (very early) fall. The sun is out, the cats are lazing on the sun-warmed deck, some bees are buzzing around the fall flowers. It’s a peaceful picture that is showing itself outside my deck window. And yet, inside me I feel an urging, a sense of movement forward: “something is changing.” 

In some Christian traditions September 29th has been celebrated as Michaelmas or the Feast of  Saint Michael (or the Feast of the Archangels). Placed close to the fall equinox, it used to be a festival connected to harvest time in the northern hemisphere, and to this day it remains the day of certain term changes in parts of the UK (e.g. Michalemas terms are referenced at universities and in the court system). 

Placed at the end of summer Michaelmas also falls into the time period when we in the northern hemisphere are beginning to “retreat” back into ourselves after the open and social summer months. The days are getting shorter, the evenings and nights are cooler. Gone are the days of sitting in the yard until late at night, chatting with friends, looking at the stars. More and more we withdraw into our own rooms and homes, maybe begin to light candles in the evening, swapping the summer drinks for a cup of tea, the social chatter for a book and blanket. And as this happens, we also – sometimes inadvertently – connect back to our own inner development, the goals of personal growth we had set at the start of the year, the realization of personal shortcomings, the inner need for something new. 

Just like the farmers are harvesting what has been ripened by the summer sun, we look at the bounty of our summer months; and like the farmer prepares the soil for the next planting, we begin to prepare our souls for the next thing to come. However, unlike the farmer, most of us don’t have a conscious idea of what it is that we want to “plant” or, if we do, what it would take specifically for that new seed to take. And so fall often becomes a time of depression and anxiety as many feel that inner urge, that sense that something has to change (or is changing) combined with a sense of lack of understanding or control. Few of us like change we don’t know or understand!

The teacher and philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) spoke about Michaelmas as a celebration of the will, a festival to remind us that we can forge our own “weapons” and slay our own “dragons”. To me that image of Michaelmas has been helpful for many years. At the end of summer, when the warmth of the outer sun slowly begins to withdraw, Michaelmas time becomes the signal that it is time to reforge my inner fire, to focus again on my own will-power, my own self-development, my personal and professional goals, my direction in life. I imagine picking up some of the thoughts and plans, experiences and questions I may have dropped or laid aside during the long and open summer days and I focus inside. I start to enquire into myself: 

• What do I need to look at / deal with first? 
• What do I need correct, change, add, remove from my life – physical habits, thought processes, emotional patterns, etc.? 
• What is next: how am I going to move forward this fall, this winter? 
• How am I going to prepare my Self, my soul, my life in such a way that come spring I am ready for a new growth spurt? 
• And – most importantly – what do I need to keep in mind so that I actually follow through?

Most people have New Year’s resolutions on January 1st. Most people also don’t really follow through with those resolutions. Maybe that is because we place them on the wrong date. At the end of September, Michaelmas has some of the most wonderful supportive energy for firing on our will-powers. Maybe if we start to consciously work on our resolutions now, we have a better chance to actually keep up with them. 

Michaelmas verse

Nature, I carry your motherly being 
in my own will’s being;
and the fire of my will
steels my spirit’s impulses,
so they bring forth a sense of Self
that I may bear my Self in me.

Rudolf Steiner (my translation, 2019)