Harvesting Inspiration
There is something about fall that has always felt like a beginning to me.
Maybe it's all those years of measuring time by the school calendar. September meant new notebooks, sharpened pencils, new classrooms, and the strange combination of nerves and possibility that came with beginning again. Even now, long after my own school years have passed, I can feel that familiar shift as summer begins leaning toward fall.
It feels hopeful.
“One season hasn’t neatly ended so another can begin. They overlap. I’m harvesting from what came before while preparing for what comes next.”
Which is interesting, because fall is so often described as a season of endings. Leaves fall. Gardens fade. Days grow shorter. The landscape begins its slow movement toward winter.
But that isn't quite how I experience it.
In the garden, I'm still gathering tomatoes from plants that began months ago as seeds and tiny starts. I'm enjoying the abundance of summer while already thinking about what I'll plant when those tomatoes are finished producing. One season hasn't neatly ended so another can begin. They overlap. I'm harvesting from what came before while preparing for what comes next.
Maybe that's part of why fall feels so big to me.
Everything seems to be moving.
The evenings begin to cool. The light changes. The landscape suddenly becomes bold with colors that weren't there a few weeks before. Golds appear beside greens. Rust and red creep across leaves. Grasses dry into shades of straw and ochre. The first cool evening arrives and reminds us that another season is already on its way.
I love hiking during this time of year.
Some of it is simply the pleasure of being outside when the air finally loses the heaviness of summer. But becoming a fiber artist has changed the way I move through those landscapes. Somewhere along the way, I started looking more closely.
A leaf is rarely just orange.
Pick one up and suddenly there is olive green running through the center. There may be rust around the edges, tiny freckles of red, veins of brown, and patches of gold where the light catches it. Stand at an overlook and what first appears to be a mountain covered in autumn orange becomes dozens of colors layered together: scarlet and mustard, evergreen and copper, gray stone, deep brown, and hazy blue along the distant ridges.
I notice those things now.
“We gather experiences without always knowing we’re gathering them.”
I suppose, in my own way, I'm harvesting.
I don't need to put the leaf in my pocket or bring anything home from the trail. I carry the colors with me. I take photographs. I remember the way two unexpected shades sat beside one another or how a bright patch of color appeared against something dark and quiet.
And eventually, some of those things find their way into wool.
A landscape becomes a colorway. The bark of a tree becomes texture in a batt. A handful of autumn colors I noticed on a hike might reappear months later in a set of rolags, although by then the connection may have softened enough that I don't immediately recognize where it began.
I've been looking back through photographs from autumn hikes and realizing how much else comes home with us, too.
There is a photograph of Midnight standing on a trail surrounded by fall color, looking back toward me. At the time, it was simply a picture from a hike with my pup. I couldn't have known exactly what that photograph would hold for me years later.
Maybe that's another kind of harvest.
We gather experiences without always knowing we're gathering them.
A walk through the woods. A dog beside us on the trail. A garden overflowing with tomatoes. A particular shade of green on a leaf just beginning to turn. The feeling of cool air arriving after months of summer heat.
We carry these things forward.
They become part of the way we see the next season and, I think, part of the things we haven't made yet.
Perhaps that's one of the reasons creativity can feel mysterious. We like to imagine inspiration arriving suddenly, as though an idea simply appeared one morning and asked to be made. But I wonder how often the idea has actually been gathering for years.
A color remembered from one place.
A texture from another.
Something we learned with our hands.
Someone we loved.
A season we thought had already passed.
All of it quietly carried forward until one day our hands begin making something new from pieces of what came before.
Maybe this is why I don't experience fall entirely as an ending.
There is too much beginning happening at the same time.
I'm harvesting what grew during summer and preparing the garden for what comes next. I'm walking through autumn landscapes while already imagining colors that may eventually belong to winter. The holiday season waits somewhere ahead, and beyond that January, with all of its declarations about fresh starts and new beginnings.
But I don't think beginnings are ever quite as clean as a blank page.
Every new season contains traces of the ones that came before it. Every new thing we make is touched, somehow, by what we've already seen, learned, loved, lost, noticed, and gathered along the way.
Perhaps that's what I love most about fall. It reminds me that beginnings don't have to arrive empty-handed. Sometimes we step into the next season with our arms already full.