As I am typing this, I am looking at blood red Virginia Creeper trailing down across the French window at Westacre. Windfalls dot the ground under apple trees laden with fruit. The crown of the big oak tree across the lane is coloured with hints of gold among the green. Meanwhile, at home, I am struggling to gather in my own crop of apples and grateful that the sunflower I planted in the spring has at last produced one golden bloom.

It has been a strange year that started very dark, then shone brightly for a while, and now I feel a melancholy sadness that the year is fading, the cycle ending again. Part of me would like to hang on to the personal triumphs of the summer and dance in the light just a little longer.

The harvest that is dominating my life at the moment is my new job. I've been doing it for four weeks now and am still very much learning (and forgetting and re-learning) the ropes. What do I do when a tutor wants to order some books for the library? And when I want to move a Saturday workshop from one week to the next? And what exactly is involved when I need to close a course due to lack of enrolments? All that learning is making me very tired. My brain is overflowing with it - to the extent that I've started dreaming of the institute's database.

The tiredness, and the actual time involved, does squeeze my spiritual work into a corner that I need to be careful to defend. In order to gather in my spiritual harvest, I need to stay in touch with the stillness, the connection with the goddess I found during the more leisurely days of summer. I have to meditate. I have to go outside during my lunch break and see some trees. I have to breathe in the stillness that surrounds and lives inside all things. And I'm finding that hard to do with my brain full of course codes and student enquiries.

My first reaction is to grab at it, to work at finding it again, to punch my way out of the buzzing cage of my brain. But doing that just adds to the stress and makes the buzz louder. I know that much by now. Trying to hold on to that quiet spaciousness behind all things is like trying to keep the vivid red of the Virginia Creeper. It doesn't work. If I keep the leaf, the colour will die. All I can do is be with it and let it nourish me while it's here. The only way to harvest the stillness of my spiritual work is to make sure that I take the time to go to the places where it can be found. To be with it, quietly and gratefully, trusting that it will feed me through the dark of winter.