nature's zodiac

It always takes me by surprise how Halloween-like the scenery looks when Scorpio Season begins. It’s not just the blow-up ghosts and cats with purple eyes in various front yards, it’s the atmosphere. Things start to look supernatural. The leaves, with their brilliant autumn hues seem to glow against the grey skies. The skies look marbled, as if about to reveal a black hole. The leaves blow against the sidewalks making a sound like a shaman’s rattle.

This year, it seems due to the heavy rain, the lilacs in my yard are blooming in October. Like pretty little ghosts of Spring, they celebrate themselves again as new.

Libra Season may be my favorite. I love how the surroundings sharpen and seem to create more distance in my psyche. And just when the colors are the deepest of saturations, and the air is most fragrant with that fallen leaves smell, the plot turns. I always forget how dramatic it is.

It is like a gorgeous melody that suddenly shifts into an alluring minor key. It’s as if nature is saying, but wait.. there’s more!

A secret life stirs within nature. The scorpion glows a green-blue under moonlight. It fluoresces, which means that it emits light after having absorbed light (or electromagnetic radiation).

I think of all the light I absorbed this past season, while enjoying the farmers market with friends, taking fresh and fluttery-leaved walks with my boy around town, and going to harvest festivals with apple roasting and horse-pulled carriages. And then I think about what really pulls me to these people, these events, and these activities; it is the stirring of the secret life, an attraction to nature built deep into my biology.

Biologist and philosopher E.O Wilson coined the term biophilia to describe an innate affinity for life and lifelike processes. He says that because humans have evolved with the rest of creation, they possess a biological attraction to nature, a craving for rich textures, complexity and diversity.

Libra season always has me at hello. It is so charming with its first pops of new color, its slow-motion stretches of bright leaves as they flutter to the ground. My boy drives the enjoyment farther up with his eager attempts to catch a falling leaf, or maybe just bring a giant pile into his bedroom as ‘treasure’. But Scorpio season always surprises me, and encourages some psychological sleuthing.

What is this secret life that glows in these ghostly lilacs? If the glow-effect of bright leaves against grey skies is not a phenomenon of fluorescence, might it still be a psychological fluorescence? One that compares the light of a bright leaf to the obscurity of a grey and marbled sky? Do my eyes fluoresce some of these effects? Does the light that I have absorbed over my lifetimes emit outward again towards the natural world, rendering it a bit supernatural in its beauty?

The biophile in me senses so.

Fluoresce with a Full Harvest Moon this Saturday, October 28th.