When the Autumn equinox comes around it always makes me feel slightly melancholy.

I yearn for open fires and warm houses and the early approach of evening always makes me feel introverted and alone.

Its a time of year for study in my life.

In summer I am active and sit in fields with friends around fires jumping with the energy of the summer.

But in Autumn the fire changes it becomes warming and requires that you sit in quiet reflection on the year that has been and the one that is coming. Really there is no new year as in January the first, we just cycle from beginning and end to beginning and end.

This year we are doing a ritual play to honour the Equinox.

We are going to perform the Demeter and Persepone story.

While writing the ritual It made me think about what the themes represent here.

Demeter - the mother of all life. the giver of our food, without the planet providing sustenance for us we would not be, and this provision of food is seen as a right by people of the West. Sadly this is not the case in the third world countries and as such they have a more thankful attitude to the food that they have. We on the other hand waste the bounty that the earth provides. We take for granted all that we have an pay no heed to the cost of the food that we eat.

Maybe Demeter is right to remove it from us.

Persephone - The beautiful Goddes of light, She in the beginning of hte story is young and innocent, walking with her maidens along the banks of a river. Here she represents beginnings, she is the young and seems to represent the beginning of life, however she is an immortal and therefore has no real beginning or end. After being taken by Hades she becomes the Dread Persphone queen of the dead and stands as the Light in the underworld.