After a full week of rain, we have finally entered the best parts of Autumn!

I wake up to crisp days with brilliant sunshine.

A rainbow of colors has started painting the trees

Football season in all its competitive revelry is back in full swing.

Fall boots and soft, cozy sweaters are the outfits of choice.

My kitchen smells of the aroma of soups simmering in the slow cooker.

I can see the sunlight dancing on the leaves outside my window as they blow in the wind.

Apples to please the preference of any palate are everywhere I go.

It seems that wherever you look there is abundance to behold in this harvest season and a little bit of magic and sparkle to go with it.

I love fall because of that reminder of abundance.

The reminder to pause and recognize that we often have so much more than we stop to give gratitude for.

And full permission to slow down and fully embrace those feelings of joy.

But that’s not to say everything is perfect and rosy in Fall. Like every season, we continue to live life with all the ups and downs that come with it.

But what if that’s actually the key to joy?

For me, yesterday I celebrated both the holiday of Sukkot, a festival of abundance, and honored the anniversary of my grandfather’s passing. So it was a day with both feelings of joy and feelings of sadness..

What if days just like that, ones filled with both sadness and celebration, are really what joy is all about?

According to Rabbi Alan Lew,

“Joy is a deep release of the soul, and includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our being fully to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.”

One of my favorite ways to bring myself this deep joy is through reading. I love how immersed I become in a really good story, how much I fully feel the character’s emotions and how their experiences can help me to understand a depth of life that I wouldn’t be able to find in my own reality.

Even when it is a story that contains heartbreak or sadness or struggle, there is a deep joy in the opportunity to live that experience through the character's eyes and the words on the page.

Here is a list of my favorite fall reading recommendations!

I would love to hear yours! Leave a comment below and let me know what’s the best book you’ve read this year?!

May you continue to acknowledge, embrace and do the things that bring you joy, and also find joy in choosing to fully inhabit and give your being to all of the experiences in your life.