Gathering Words: A Journaling Guide for Fall
Reflecting on the Season
Autumn is not only a time for preserving the harvest for the winter to come, but also a time for reflection. This autumn journaling guide will help you to take time to sit with a journal and reflect on summer’s bounty while jars of the season’s harvest ferment in your kitchen.
Take time to notice the changes in the world around you: the cooling air, the falling leaves, the scent of summer-dried grass in a meadow. Take stock of these changes in your journal by recording the rituals you will observe with the changing of the season, and the recipes you will cook. Autumn is a time to let both ideas and produce to ferment, a subtle transformation of both thought and vegetable. Journaling in the autumn is a way of catching the fleeting textures of the season, prepare yourself for the season to come and to build memory through words.
Gathering Your Autumn Thoughts
Autumn is a time ripe for reflection and creativity, as it is a transitional time in which the fullness of the summer harvest gives way to winter. It is a time of letting go and preparing to turn inward with the coming of winter. Journaling is a way to gather and reflect on the bounty of the year, help with the transition to winter, bring creative ideas to light while the harvest ferments in your kitchen. It is a way to preserve memory and thought as fermentation preserves the harvest.
Practices for Writing Through the Season
Daily Moments
Write a short, simple entry focused on an image, scent, or moment in the day. This can take the form of a poem, a paragraph, or a list. It’s a way to preserve a memory of the season that you may come back to and reflect on during the darker days of winter.
Harvest Log
You may choose to keep a more practical notebook to record the harvest, what you’ve preserved, or the recipes that you cook during the autumn season. Include sketches, pressed leaves, and recipe notes. This notebook may help to inform your planting choices in the spring or serve as a personal compendium of recipes to cook year after year.
Seasonal Reflections
Longer entries may take the form of personal essays about the season, your ancestors, observations from harvest-time in the garden, in nature, or in the kitchen, or lists of gratitude or thanksgiving.
Word Collage
Let pieces of conversation, dreams, autumnal colors, harvest-time dishes, or tarot pulls accumulate like the leaves fallen from the trees. Take stock of these fragments and work to bring them together, to form them into something whole: a poem, a story, a memory to carry into the coming winter.
Journaling Invitations for Fall
Let the pages of your journal be your storehouse: a place to preserve the richness of the season, and to kindle warmth for the months ahead.
Hearth & Fermentation
Notice the warmth of the kitchen and the quiet rituals of tending home and pantry.
- If you had to preserve one flavor of autumn to last all winter, what would it be, and why?
- Record a sensory memory from your kitchen today: the smell, the warmth, the sounds.
- How does light shift through your windows at this time of year, and how does it change the way your home feels?
- Which objects or tools do you reach for more often in autumn: blankets, kettles, jars, books? Write about their presence in your daily rhythm.
Season & Nature
Prompts to attune your senses to the shifting light, air, and textures that signal the turning of the year.
- What signs told you that autumn had arrived this year?
- What is the soundscape of autumn around you: rustling leaves, rain, crows, silence?
- Write about the way dusk feels different in autumn compared to summer.
Inner Harvest
A gentle turning inward, these prompts invite you to reflect on growth, letting go, and the ways you prepare for rest.
- What is something you are ready to release, like leaves falling?
- Write a ritual that you would like to perform this season. What is the purpose of this ritual? What tools will you use or what words will you say?
- In what ways are you preparing to turn inward and to store up energy for the darker months?
Creative Fermentation
Invite your ideas to steep and transform, noticing what’s bubbling beneath the surface of your imagination.
- Write a short “recipe” for autumn. What are its ingredients?
- Record a dream you’ve had recently. How does it relate to the season, the harvest, or a time of reflection and turning inward?
- If you could bottle one story from this season, what would it be, and who would you share it with?
Carrying Words into Winter
Journaling is a way to gather your thoughts just as you gather the harvest, to give your thoughts time to slow and ferment into memories that you can carry with you into winter, just as you can carry your jars of preserves into the season to come.
Choose one journaling method or one prompt and begin journaling with the season today. It can be simply pausing to record a moment with a single sentence.
