Autumn—My Favorite Season
By Sister Rebecca Autumn is my favorite season. After the spring and summer great activities in our lives here at New Skete, I welcome the serenity, the quiet, the longer periods of the darker days in autumn and winter. I love the beauty of the leaves turning colors: amazing hues of gold, orange, red, and purple; the sight of the corn stalks along roads; the bales of hay; the bright pumpkins in the fields and on doorsteps. As autumn moves into winter, I feel a certain attraction to go inward, for more time for reflection, reading, meditating, and contemplation. It is a time when we, as a community, are drawn less outward. After the intense spring and summer events—seminars, retreats, concerts, pilgrimage, picnics—I sense a need for a time to re-center, to replenish, and to go inward. This season brings back to me the memory of one past autumn in Provence, France, where I lived as a monastic in the foothills of the Alpill