Golden leaves and fresh rains and the chilling breeze. Harvest was once the name of the season entire, only when the word Autumn began to creep into the lexicon did the meaning of harvest shift, nimbly dodging into its new niche as a verb, but still remains intimately tied to the season from which it came. Autumn, the time of harvest. The season of culmination, of festivals and bonfires, when all that has been sown is reaped. But also the season of decline, the season favored by the melancholic, the months when the heat of the year begins to leech from the Earth and the cold seeps in to take its place. The time for reflection before the paralytic rest of winter.
That the a year in the course of its life goes through phases so analogous to our own is one of life's great coincidences. Though, of course, this does not apply at the equator. For many regions along that line there are only two seasons, the wet and the dry. There the year goes through a simple oscillation between a time when life flows and multiplies and when it stagnates and recedes. A contrasting but equally true analogue to our lives. A stark yin and yang compared to the repeating color wheel of our deciduous seasons.