What If Autumn Isn’t Asking You to Grow?

autumn intuitive soul painting reflection Oct 01, 2026

By: Anna-Emilia Hietanen | Intuitive Soul Painting

School is starting! New semester, new notebooks, new school supplies. Even if you aren't going to school or university anymore, autumn often carries a feeling of beginning again. New courses start. New hobbies. New routines. In some ways, September can feel like a smaller New Year.

The personal-development world loves this idea of new. Becoming the New You. Transforming yourself. Finally starting Your New Life. Growing, expanding, blooming into the person you were always meant to become.

But if we actually look at nature in autumn, something quite different is happening.

This is not the season of constant blooming. Plants and flowers are withering. Trees seem to say goodbye to summer with one final display of brilliant color, only to let their leaves fall and decompose. The days grow shorter. Many animals begin preparing for winter. After the growing season and the harvest, much of nature is getting ready to rest.

We don't look at a bare tree in November and think it has failed at personal development.

And yet we don't always give ourselves the same grace.

Especially when we're interested in self-development, it can begin to feel as though we're supposed to be growing all the time: becoming something new, pursuing the next dream, working on ourselves, blooming. And when we aren't—when we rest, when we don't know what comes next, when a dream isn't moving forward—it can feel as though we're doing something wrong.

Maybe autumn offers another possibility.

Autumn is also a season of harvest. We can notice what has ripened in our lives—both the things we're pleased with and the things that didn't turn out quite as we hoped—and then allow ourselves to stop for a while.

Not every dream is ripe yet. Not every seed needs to sprout immediately. Some seeds spend the cold and dark months hidden in the earth.

An old Finnish threshold

Kekri is an old Finnish harvest celebration traditionally held after the agricultural work of the growing season had been completed. Its timing varied from household to household, but the Kekri season fell roughly between late September and early November.

It marked not only the end of the harvest and working year, but also a threshold between the old year and the new. People feasted on the harvest, remembered ancestors and paid attention to omens about the year ahead. Agricultural workers also had a period away from their usual work, and servants could use the time to visit home and decide whether they would stay in the same place of service or find a new one.

Kekri wasn't, of course, an ancient Finnish self-care workshop. People living in an agricultural society had plenty of work to do throughout winter.

But I find something compelling in the rhythm behind it: the work of one season came to an end before the next began.

There was harvest. Celebration. A threshold. A pause.

As Finnish society became more urbanized and the agricultural rhythm of the year became less central to everyday life, Kekri gradually declined, although the celebration has been experiencing a revival in Finland.

Perhaps we don't need to recreate the lives or rituals of people who lived hundreds of years ago to become curious about the rhythm they lived within.

We can celebrate what has ripened. We can acknowledge the results of work whose seeds may have been planted months—or years—before.

And perhaps we can also allow some things to remain unfinished.

A dream doesn't necessarily need to become a goal today. An idea doesn't have to become a project. A seed doesn't have to prove that it's growing just because we can't see what it's doing underground.

So as the season changes, you might pause and ask yourself:

What has already ripened? What can I harvest?

And also:

What can stop growing for now? What is allowed to rest?

If you'd like to explore these questions with your hands as well as your mind, I've created Between Light & Shadow: A Kekri-Inspired Creative Reflection for Harvest, Rest & the Darkening Season.

It's a gentle creative practice inspired by Kekri and the changing season. You don't need any art experience, and there is no particular image—or insight—you're supposed to produce.

Explore Between Light & Shadow: https://www.intuitivesoulpainting.com/f/between-light-and-shadow

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What If Autumn Isn’t Asking You to Grow?

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