In France, they call it “La Rentrée,” the Re-entry. Leave it to the French to have a much better turn-of-phrase than what we tend to call “back-to-school.” It is the moment to begin, again.
The Re-entry lives beyond our formal academic years, whether they be your own or those of the kids in your life. It is that seasonal feeling of renewal, starting over, stepping into the emergent self of the new school year that you get long after completing your formal education.
For me, this feeling of rebirth and renewal shows up as soon as Labor Day weekend is complete. I’m not one of those January 1 start over types, nor one who experiences a feeling of rebirth in the re-greening of the landscape during the springtime. The imprints of a school year that began after Labor Day set into my bones and blood at a young age and there it remains—the renewal of September.
On the surface, this imprint of a “new” year beginning just as nature begins dissolving itself, makes little sense. But if you dive a bit deeper, there is a layer of energetic and archetypal support for this feeling.
In a broad-based Celtic view of the seasonal turns of the year, the Autumn is linked to the archetypes of both the Mothering energy and the energy of the sovereign Queen. In both of these archetypes, the energy that we find as Autumn makes it’s entry is reflected in archetypal images not of a mother holding a child for the Mother archetype, but one of a pregnant woman. She is ripe and ready to begin. Prepared and waiting not just to give birth but to be birthed into into a whole new aspect of herself.
Likewise, entering into Autumn, the archetype of the Queen is less the queen at the completion of her reign, but more in the transition between ascending to the throne and being coronated. The photo below is of a 25-year old newly ascended Queen Elizabeth II. Here she is on the plane back to Britain having received the news of her father, the king’s, death while abroad. This plane ride marks the end of her life as princess and heir to the throne. When she emerges, she steps into the role of Queen tentative as a foal or a fawn taking its first steps.
Certainly part of this moment known as the Re-Entry, is the willingness to listen, to learn and to ask questions.
In the traditions that I am a part of, we use questions as a journey into deeper discovery. The questions are very much a quest, and you can imagine the word question as a derivative word of questing.
These “questings” arise from a deeper part of the landscapes of our being. How are endings and beginnings intimately linked? What aspect of myself is emergent in the waning daylight of Autumn? How do I take everything I’ve learned in the previous school year/iteration of myself, and trust it enough as the very foundation of living into an entirely new iteration of myself?
The Re-Entry is our invitation to consciously move with the process of our learning, our growth and our deepening understanding. It is the invitation to trust what you know, not as an avenue that leads to being stuck in place or repeating the previous grade, but rather as an invitation to build upon it as the steady foundation of the architecture you are moving into. The Queen moves into the palace being fully inexperienced in her new role, while being fully prepared for it.
With all of this moving through my being, I spent Labor Day weekend doing the equivalent of organizing and packing my backpack for the upcoming year—I cleaned and reorganized the house and my office after a month away in England and a full summer season of a loose schedule and an annoyingly persistent energetic refusal to get the show on the road. In fact, there were days this summer season that felt like the last month of pregnancy, when you are just ready to be done with it, but as my doctor told me 30 years ago when my first born was past due,
“She’ll be born when she’s ready to be born. Your job is to be ready, and then, to wait.”
The Re-Entry follows suit. It’s the return to the old school building but into a new classroom. It is the tug between being brand new into the new academic year and yet have earned the credentials to be there. It’s showing back up to whatever ongoing thing you are part of (your work, your art, your family, your circles) willing and ready to be new within it. It is the trusting of all you know and the vulnerability within all you don’t know. It’s the night-before nerves and the afternoon-after confidence.
We are humans capable of holding the complexity of the both-and. We can simultaneously end and begin. There is birth in Autumn as surely as there is death in Spring.
With that, may we re-enter into our lives with trust and vulnerability for who we are becoming and what is emergent.
This is what it is to learn and to grow for a lifetime.
This is the Re-Entry.