LETTERS OF LOVE
Fall Equinox • September 2026
There are certain things I have known for a very long time, but haven’t always felt brave enough to say plainly.
Perhaps because some things are easier to feel than they are to explain.
This is one of them:
I believe the spiritual journey and the psychological journey are not two separate paths.
I believe they are happening at the same time.
For me, the deeper I have travelled inward, the more I have come to understand that there is no clean line between the soul and the psyche. Between what we call healing and what we call becoming. Between the unseen world within us and the very ordinary, very human lives we are living every day.
Our relationships can become mirrors.
Our pain can become a doorway.
Our desires can reveal what has been waiting to be remembered.
Our bodies can tell stories our minds have learned to forget.
And sometimes, if we become quiet enough, the world around us begins to speak in ways we can feel before we can explain.
This is part of why I have always been drawn to the moon.
To astrology.
To the changing seasons.
To the subtle language of nature.
Not because I believe we are meant to hand our lives over to the stars, or because I think there is one predetermined story written somewhere above us.
Quite the opposite.
I believe these things can offer us mirrors.
Ways of noticing.
Ways of listening.
Ways of placing ourselves within something larger than the small, hurried story we may be telling ourselves in any particular moment.
The moon changes, and we change with her.
The seasons turn, and something in us turns too.
There are times when life asks us to expand, to reach, to create, to move outward into the world.
And there are times when something quieter calls us home.
I have come to believe that both are sacred.
And perhaps this is also where my understanding of feminine energy has grown from.
Not as a set of rules about how a woman should be.
Not as another identity to perform.
And certainly not as something soft and pretty that exists only in the realm of spirituality.
For me, the feminine is something much deeper.
It is the wisdom of embodiment.
The ability to listen inward.
To notice what is happening beneath the surface.
To honour intuition, desire, boundaries, creativity, rest, receptivity, sensuality, grief, pleasure, and change.
It is learning to hear the parts of ourselves that may have become quiet because the world was too loud.
It is remembering that we are not machines designed to produce endlessly.
We are living beings.
Cyclical beings.
And there is wisdom in that.
For a long time, I didn’t always feel bold enough to speak about these things openly.
Perhaps because there is something vulnerable about allowing another person to see the way you actually experience the world.
But I am arriving at a place in my life where I no longer want to hide the language that has helped me understand my own.
This is how I see the world.
This is what I have discovered.
This is what I am still discovering.
And this is what I want to explore here.
So I created Letters of Love as a small, open space for that.
There will be no formula for these letters.
No particular subject I have to stay inside.
Some months I may write about the moon or an astrological shift.
Some months it may be about the seasons, relationships, creativity, healing, embodiment, or the strange and beautiful process of becoming ourselves.
And some months, perhaps, something entirely different will ask to be written.
I want to leave room for that.
Because life itself is not a category.
And neither is the inner world.
These letters are simply a place for me to put words around what I am noticing, feeling, learning, questioning, remembering.
A place where I can write honestly.
And perhaps, in reading them, you may find something that speaks quietly to you too.
Not because we have to arrive at the same conclusions.
But because sometimes another person’s words give language to something we have already been carrying inside ourselves.
And perhaps that is one of the simplest forms of love.
To say:
I have felt this too.
So, for our first letter, it feels only right that we begin at a threshold.
The Fall Equinox.
There is something beautiful about this particular turning of the wheel.
For a moment, the light and the dark are held in balance.
Neither has won.
Neither needs to.
We are simply standing at the threshold between them.
And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the days begin to darken.
The trees begin their great release.
What was once green becomes gold, copper, rust, and red.
The earth begins gathering herself inward.
And perhaps we are invited to do the same.
There is a particular kind of wisdom in autumn that I have always loved.
It does not ask the leaves to remain.
It does not tell the trees that letting go is a failure.
There is no shame in what has completed its season.
The leaf simply releases.
And the tree remains.
Perhaps we can learn something from that.
Perhaps there are things in our own lives that have already completed themselves, even if some part of us is still holding on.
A relationship.
An old identity.
A version of ourselves we built to survive.
A belief about who we are supposed to be.
A dream that once belonged to us but no longer does.
A habit of abandoning ourselves in order to be loved.
A story we have repeated so many times that we have forgotten it was ever only a story.
Autumn does not demand that we release everything at once.
It simply begins the conversation.
What has ripened?
What has run its course?
What am I carrying that no longer belongs in the season ahead?
What am I ready to stop tending?
And perhaps just as importantly:
What do I want to carry with me?
Because release is not the only sacred act of autumn.
There is also gathering.
Gathering what we have learned.
Gathering what has nourished us.
Gathering the relationships, practices, truths, and pieces of ourselves that have become more precious with time.
We do not enter the darker half of the year empty-handed.
We enter carrying the harvest.
The Fall Equinox arrives as the Sun moves into Libra, a season often associated with relationship, balance, beauty, harmony, and the meeting of self and other.
And I find that especially beautiful here.
Because balance is not the absence of darkness.
It is the willingness to make room for both.
The part of us that longs to be seen and the part that longs to disappear for a while.
The part that wants to begin again and the part that needs to grieve what has ended.
The part that reaches toward the light and the part that is learning how to sit peacefully in the dark.
Perhaps wholeness is not choosing one over the other.
Perhaps it is learning how to hold them both.
This is the invitation I feel in this Equinox.
To pause.
To notice.
To let the year speak.
To honour what has grown.
To honour what has ended.
To honour the woman, man, person, soul—you—who has travelled through everything this year has brought so far.
You do not need to have everything figured out before the season changes.
You do not need to know exactly who you are becoming.
You only need to be willing to meet yourself where you are.
And perhaps, for a little while, that is enough.
So as we cross this threshold together, I invite you to ask yourself gently:
What am I ready to release?
What has completed its season?
What am I ready to stop carrying?
What is still alive within me?
What deserves my devotion now?
And what would it feel like to trust the season I am actually in?
Not the season I think I should be in.
Not the season someone else expects me to be in.
The one I am actually living.
There is no rushing autumn.
There is no rushing the trees.
There is no rushing the dark.
Everything has its time.
Perhaps we can let ourselves have ours.
With love,
Charleigh
The Rising Femme
Where the woman within begins to rise.
Rise, always.