Days, months and years are no more time than rulers are what they measure.

From the Siva-Tantra

EPHEMERIS

The Jerusalem Artichoke moon wanes through its third quarter through the weekend, entering its last phase at 3:56 a.m. on October 11. Rising in the middle of the night and setting in the middle of the day, this moon will lie overhead in the morning.

Venus and Saturn move into Virgo this October, keeping their place in the east before dawn. Mars rises in Cancer after midnight and moves to the center of the sky by sunrise. Jupiter lies in the southwest after dark in Capricorn, setting by the time Mars comes up on the other side of the horizon.

Reflecting the relationship of the Earth to the sun, local trees now accelerate their leafturn. Ashes, cottonwoods, redbuds, box elders and hickories reach full color and start shedding. More maples become red and orange as Middle Fall approaches. Burning bush is bright scarlet. Ginkgo fruits, which will be on the ground by late November, are turning pink.

LEOPARDS AND JAGUARS
When I was a boy, my grandfather lived with our family, and he often amused us with his fortunetelling, interpreting the patterns that the coffee grounds made at the bottom of his cup. He used to say that this was how the gypsies told the future long ago in Ireland, and he always hinted there was magic to be learned.

He foretold no great events, and his predictions were often silly, but his commentary put a little extra fun in meals, and I have ever since looked at patterns to see what I could see or pretend to see.

That certain designs or shapes have meaning can lead to assumptions that other designs or shapes also might have meaning. It is not so unusual to discover elephants or faces or angels in the moods of the sky, especially in the cotton-like, fair-weather cumulus clouds that follow the arrival of a cold front. And the dramatic mare’s tails of cirrus clouds are replete with significance, foretelling rain and cold as accurately as any digital forecast.

The ancient doctrine of signatures held that the shape of a plant’s leaves foretold its use. For example, the hepatica’s leaf, reminiscent of the shape of the human liver, was thought to be made by the Creator to cure liver ailments. If the doctrine was erroneous, it held its own for more than a thousand years, so attractive was the lure of patterns.

In his journal of October 3, 1859, Henry David Thoreau noted that the yellow fallen leaves were “all thickly brown spotted and very handsome, somewhat leopard like.” The ground, he said, was “strewn with thousands any one of which if you carry it home, it will refresh and delight you to behold.”

The pleasure arose in part from Thoreau’s reading of patterns and their lessons: “If we have not the leopard and jaguar and tiger in our woods,” he said, “we have all their spots and rosettes and stripes in our autumn tinted leaves.” To those same leaves, leopards, jaguars and tigers might be added the radii of so many other animals, or of a winter forecast or the memory of a loved one, a scent from one autumn that stays above all the rest.

    “The most profound symbols are evocatory,” states Charles Muses in his Destiny and Control in Human Systems, “and are magical in this sense.” The magic ripens with distance and time. I still imagine fortunes with coffee grounds or leaves, playing like my grandfather and Thoreau played, allowing associations to go where they will, filling the forest and my head with the sorcery of wild beasts and reminiscence, refreshment and delight.