The Beaver Moon's Wild Arrival

Fall – Week 46 – On Swollen Moons and Scattered Leaves

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

Each night this past week, I was drawn to watch her swelling. Commanded, it seemed, by some ancient pull I couldn’t name. This November moon was growing pregnant with light, heavy with promise. The Beaver Moon, they call her, and this year she would be the largest supermoon we’ve seen in years, pulling at the tides within us as surely as she pulls at the ocean. Night by night, her presence grew stronger.

Then came November 5th, and the wind arrived like a wild herald announcing her approach. All day, the air churned and thrashed, sending the leaves into frenzied flight. They scattered across the ground like small creatures fleeing some unseen predator, skittering and racing in desperate sprints across pavements and grass. The wind stripped branches bare with an urgency that felt almost violent, as if nature herself was in a hurry to clear the stage for winter’s arrival.

Driving home that late windy afternoon, I watched the sky transform into an artist’s palette. Pink bleeding into blue, purple emerging from the spaces between. The light had that particular quality that comes when seasons collide, when autumn’s golden warmth meets winter’s cool clarity. Through my windshield, the world seemed caught between two states of being, neither fully one thing nor another, but something altogether more magical in its transition.

The leaves, oh, the leaves. They didn’t simply fall; they danced and spiraled and fled. The wind orchestrated their movement into mini cyclones that spun across the road, and for brief moments I felt transported to Dorothy’s Kansas, waiting for the tornado to lift me into another realm. These whirlwinds of golden and rust-colored leaves created their own small dramas of motion and sound. The noise they made, that particular dry rustle and scrape of late autumn leaves, filled the air with nature’s percussion, a symphony of endings that somehow felt like beginnings too.

As I pulled into my driveway, the moon was already beginning her ascent, still pale against the painted sky but growing more substantial with each passing moment. From my deck, I watched her rise in all her swollen glory. She climbed through the branches of now naked trees, their bare arms reaching up as if to catch her, to hold this radiant mass that seemed almost too heavy for the sky to bear.

The wind continued its wild dance, and I stood there feeling the way it pulled at my hair, my clothes, my very sense of groundedness. Everything felt in motion. The last leaves clinging to branches, the clouds racing across the moon’s face, even the shadows shifting and flowing like water across the deck. This was nature in transition, raw and unfiltered, stripping away what was no longer needed with a fierce efficiency that left no room for sentiment.

By the next morning, the transformation was complete. A profound silence had settled over everything. A reverence, almost, as if the world needed to catch its breath after yesterday’s wild dance. The trees stood naked in this stillness, their intricate architecture revealed. Where yesterday had been chaos and fury, now there was only quiet contemplation. Winter had arrived not with snow or ice but with this act of unveiling, this forced surrender of autumn’s last holding. She had presided over this stripping away, watching from her height as the wind did its work, and now in the morning’s hush, we could truly see what had been revealed.

And here I find myself, near the end of this year-long exploration of healing through nature, witnessing this dramatic turning. “In Her Nature” began as a journey to rekindle joy, to repair a heart through careful attention to the seasonal shifts of my neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures. Week by week, I’ve documented the subtle and not-so-subtle changes, finding in nature’s cycles a mirror for my own transformation.

This beaver moon feels like a punctuation mark in that journey. Not an ending but a deepening. The pregnant fullness of the moon speaks to what has been gestating within me through spring’s tender beginnings, summer’s lush abundance, and autumn’s letting go. The wild wind that stripped the trees bare feels like my own process of releasing what no longer serves, making space for whatever winter will bring.

There’s something about the fierce intensity of that wind, the urgency of it, that resonates with where I find myself now. Healing isn’t always gentle. Sometimes it arrives like a November gale, demanding that we release our last clutched leaves, insisting that we stand bare-branched under the watching moon. Those mini tornadoes of leaves were external manifestations of internal whirlwinds, the spinning reorganization that happens when we’re truly changing.

Approaching the close of this year’s journey, this November moon illuminates what has shifted. The broken heart I brought to this journey has become one that finds meaning everywhere. The soul seeking rebirth has found it not in some dramatic moment of transformation but in the noticing of small miracles, in the thousand tiny revelations that come from simply paying attention.

Winter is here now. But I know something now that I didn’t know a year ago: emptiness is not absence but preparation. The trees aren’t lesser for having lost their leaves, they’re revealed, their essential structure clear against the sky. And perhaps that’s what this year of watching has done for me too: stripped away the unnecessary, revealed the essential architecture of a life learning to find joy again.

The moon is waning now, taking with her autumn’s last light. She’ll return next month with a different name, a different story. For now, the quiet holds everything.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane