Autumn Begins Unnoticed
From the shimmer of dew to the hush of owls, autumn preaches the gospel of subtraction
🍂 Autumn greetings from your neighborhood Poet-Doc!
The Botanarchy Hotline Episode 14: Autumn Begins Unnoticed is now live, pulling the plug on summer’s rave and cueing up a diaphanous dirge through the canyon pines. Call (833) ECO-POEM and tune in to the wild’s slow fade-out, where coyotes gossip in the oak litter and the stars finally remember to show up for work.
Autumn begins as a rumor, a hush, a wink from underworld… sap sinking, heaven bowing back to earth. This week on the hotline, we tune our ears to the season’s subtle trespasses, the way she slips in through the back door and rearranges the furniture while no one’s looking. Guided by our recluse poet Meng Haoran, we practice the art of seasonal awareness, listening for the hymnals autumn weaves into our body and biome. We gather these small splendors like our poet gathering dew at the bottom stair, letting them compost into our bones, a secret storehouse for the coming dark.
In the elemental wheel of Taoist medicine, autumn is the reign of the Metal element, the gospel of subtraction and polish. Metal season belongs to the editors and alchemists, those who know that radiance is born from refinement, those who understand that clarity comes not from accumulation but from surrender. Autumn arrives in black leather gloves to prune, refine, and reveal what glints beneath the rot. Breath and grief, inspiration and release -- this is the holy pivot between holding on and letting go.
Somewhere between the falling leaf and the deep inhale of the soil, a new voice takes over the frequency… cool, lucid, metallic. It’s the voice of the season itself, the whisper of the blade that prunes excess and polishes what remains. To tell a story of autumn is to listen for what vanishes. And that’s the work of poetry and medicine alike: to distill the season’s quiet splendor, compost it into marrow, and let it nourish the roots for what comes next.
As such, this week’s hotline transmission makes like a network of mycelium trading secrets beneath oak mulch, gossiping about:
🌬 The gospel of subtraction.
🍂 Meng Haoran’s ode to noticing what slips in unseen.
🪞 The Metal Element’s lessons in radical austerity.
🦉 Owls, bobcats, and other nocturnal teachers of impermanence.
🔥 A Hollywood Hills dispatch from your poet-physician’s autumn hut.
💨 An eco-poetic exercise in noticing what the season steals and what it leaves behind.
You ready?! Let’s go!
📞 Dial (833) ECO-POEM whenever the city gets too loud. We’ll be up here, whispering to the owls.
Dialing a hotline is time travel. It's a spell in mono. It's a ritual in real time.
Instructions for deep listening:
Set aside 15 unrushed minutes. Let the world know you’re unavailable to everything but wonder.
Plug in your headphones like you’re tuning into a secret station broadcast by ferns and forgotten gods.
Dial (833) ECO-POEM. This is the threshold.
Listen with more than your ears. Let your skin, your feet, your spine tune in. Let the wind be your translator.
Allow yourself be confounded. Let the unnameable rewild your nervous system
Notice what stirs. Let what you hear awaken experimentation, collaboration, playfulness - not just with words, but with stones, trees, cloudscapes, sidewalk cracks.
Take field notes: a phrase, a scent, a feeling in your ribcage.
Make time for the eco-poetic embodiment practice. Even five minutes of stillness with a tree counts.
Leave a message on the hotline voicemail, be it a whisper, a revelation, a weather report from your biome.
Hang up.
Dial again if the spirit moves you. The hotline is always there, like a stream under the city.
🌱 Read the Botanarchy Hotline manifesto + listen to the archive here.