With the Harvest Full Moon having just shined brightly recently, what a glorious sight Mother Moon was, low in the sky, hugging the morning horizon. I am feeling the beginnings of that yearly “drawing in”. The drawing in of harvest, for sure, though this time of year applies equally to the inward arc of personal experience.

By personal experience, I mean the heightening awareness of the ending of Summer’s warmth and long daylight hours. Our ancestors collected the harvest’s abundance, and stored what remained from the markets for the coming  winter. We might go so far as to call this awareness of the closing in of the nights as 

instructive of the stages of life: the seasons of the year as cyclical stories of each human life.

Whether we are at the cusp of joining society as young adults in the early twenties, pressing ahead with more mature adult identities in the late twenties, or crossing that in-between liminal space of the ‘Mid-Life Crisis/Awakening’ starting in the late thirties, the difference that makes the difference in how we each move forward, into deeper emotional maturity and self-acceptance, lies in awareness. We might assume that, as we age, the refining of awareness from the unconscious conditioning through family and society at-large, towards being an independent adult free from those old stories develops in a linear fashion.

Yet we may all be visited by our ‘unlived lives’, those unconscious facets of our nature that were denied conscious expression. The ‘Mid-Life Crisis/Awakening’ is a classic example in Western industrialised cultures, where the unrecognised aspects of ourselves struggle to be acknowledged by people experiencing this life transition. As our personalities grow, evolve, and our bodies age, the opportunities afforded in our youth narrow, our potentials restricted and focused through the consequences of prior choices and blind ol’ chance.

Mid-life – which I think really extends into the late fifties – ensures we (hopefully) accept the harvest we have sown in our younger years. That does not mean we may not embark on new endevours that enliven the soul. Rather, the scope of mid-life presents an  opportunity for each of us to consider how we may take on the archetypal mantle of ‘the elder’.