At this time of year, I have absolute devotion to the Autumn Gods and the way they diffract the light, coating everything in gold, or turn leaves to saffron and amber. I bow down at the altar and bleed from the scratches made from the hop bines and the prickles off the squash.

'Happy Autumn,' I say to my brother in law, as he departed last night with a jar of lime pickle and a bag of apples.

'Happy Autumn', says he. Christ is only on hot cross buns we devour after dinner.

It feels better to wish 'Happy Autumn' than nodding to a Christian holidays that makes no sense in Australia. Easter was originally a spring festival, celebrating fertility - hence bunnies and eggs. But we're in the southern hemisphere and things are dying, not being born. Even the daylight hours are lost as the clocks fall back.

But there is a sense of the spiritual in our fare thee wells - we talk at the car of the week's stunning sunrises, and how the morning light hits the spider webs in the forest on the way down to the coast. There's a sense of reverence. Of course, we're both surfers - that lends a sense of worship. The gods of the waves have given us many lessons how to live over the years. It's what sitting out in nature does to you. You're forced to be attentive to the song of the sea and the land.

Some of my most moving spiritual moments have been in the ocean. When we're troubled, I imagine it's like going to church for solace. It's no coicidence that surfers describe the sea as their own church, without the stained glass, the confessional, and an authoritive white male priest telling you how to live your life.

And so this 'Easter', or the turning of the seasons as Autumn melts into winter, I connect to the sense of the spiritual, of a deep, deep love for the earth, and a need to be connected to it. It is bigger than me. Like the waves that explode on the reefs or the leaves that fall to the soil and rot, my time here is brief and will soon be done, in the scheme of things. Pay attention to natural cycles, and you realise that you too are like the seeds and the dying plants, and that their resurrection is yours too as you dissolve into the earth or the sky and become physically at one with all things. When you realise that, it's hard to treat any living animals or plants with contempt or irreverence. You will become them. This is my hope and faith - a firm sense of where I am going. I don't need a Christ figure to tell me how to live my life to know that.

I think about these things on Easter Sunday as I plant garlic. It's about seasonally ritual as I get. Pressing bulbs into the warm Earth. For ten years I've been planting the same cloves. They multiply. Once ten, they become hundreds upon hundreds. Sow, shall ye reap.

And it's this tending that is an act of love, and that reminds you that anything you do with awe and reverence and mindful attention to is an act of love, that has it's bountiful rewards. Love your family, your partner, your community, your neighbour. Tend the soil of those gardens and the spring brings with it the abundant harvest - love comes back in kind.

@danielapev wrote this week:

“I work on my own spirituality when I take care of the small natural spaces that surround me, with song, water, sun and shade. Taking care of the small pieces of the earth is a way to advance in the journey of the spirit”

It's when we put our attention, our tending, to things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things that we look to blame or to project onto the outside world, or to a God that must have a reason for this chain of circumstance. I'd rather look to the 'water, sun and shade', the 'small pieces of the earth' - all the answers, and guidance, I need are there.

And so, I go back to planting garlic, and my spirit soars. It feels like the gods of the earth are speaking. I close my eyes for a moment and my heart follows it's own hymnal, the birds joining in the chorus.

Happy Autumn.