September always surprises me. How quickly the nights close in. How, once the summer heat breaks, it crashes open the autumnal door so wide. Mornings that were too hot a fortnight ago, are now cool enough to tempt me to stay indoors. The rain I have been longing for is already challenging me to gear-up against it, rather than stand out and soak it into my skin. Already there are days when I close all the windows, nights where I turn on the heating.
But the Equinox can be quixotic. There are still nights, where the heating stays off and the windows open, and while I might lie under the duvet rather than a thin sheet, I relish the night air. Cool still feels like a kiss upon the skin after weeks and months of sweltering.
September is the month when we stop being so concerned at the trees starting to shed their leaves, when we start to happily pick up windfalls. There might be blackberries still in some quarters, but mine are finished and I’ve cut back the hedgerow. I’m now into wishing-I-knew-which-fungus-are-edible season. I’m into wood-walking not for the shade, but for the scent of it: the damp earthiness that comes after the drain-smell that follows the first rains that wash out summer’s decay, the real earth-scent of leaves, sprouting mushrooms, damp wood being harvested by insects burrowing in for the winter.
And woodsmoke, as humans start to do the same. It’s early yet, but the first bonfires are burning. And I scent myth and magic in the smoke, fairy tales and folklore.
Despite its effects on our lungs when we breath it in, smoke has long been used in calming and cleansing
rituals. Bonfires are the clearing away of the debris of the growing season. The fruits of the season are harvested, and celebrated, stored against the coming of winter and enjoyed in thanksgiving – and the litter of the season, the unwanted stubble in the fields, the first fallen leaves, are burned away. Smoke rising from the ground, carrying the old news with it. Clearing cleansing ready for the new seeding.
We think of the Solstices as the pivot points of the year, but the Equinoxes have equal claim to that glory. When the dark and the light hold equal sway. When all is held in the balance. When there is that moment – if we choose to acknowledge it – of pause. Stillness. The ending of inequality.
Just for a moment.
Because we know the world is not in balance, and inequality is growing.
I know that. I know that there is still a war going on, which might not (yet?) be global in scale but is global in impact. I know that there are other wars ongoing that the news media have forgotten about. And I know that there is the struggle we humans have to understand our impact on the planet and what we might do about it. I am NOT complacent.
I do my little things: refusing, reducing, re-using, recycling, batch-cooking, waste-reducing, sharing food & car-space, putting unwanted possessions back into circulation, walking, simplifying. And trust my little things add up to something, because here is the thing – not the thing, maybe, but my thing – when I am on the receiving end of someone’s vehement protestations about what we’re doing and not doing and how it’s already too late, I want to ask: what would you have me do?
Of course I’m interested in what the global “WE” should do, but I cannot influence that. Shouting into the void at the mythical beast known as HUMANITY does not feel helpful to me. It cannot hear you. Tell me what you would have me do.
I will make my own choice about whether to follow your advice or not.
I make no claim to perfection. I am not plastic-free, or off-grid, or vegan, or totally organic. I am a productof my times, and my birthplace, and my heritage. I am a product of my own learning, and my own yearnings. You can look at my life and tell me: make this your next step, and I may listen, and I may act.
But I will not buy into your rage or your despair.
Not because I think you are wrong to feel the way you do, but simply because I choose to feel otherwise.
I make no apology. I will at times weep through your laments with you. I may sign your protest sheets, add my financial contribution where I think there is a hope of realistic challenge and change. But for my own soul and self, I choose to err on the side of beauty, on the side of spirit, rather than succumb to the flames of undirected anger. I choose not to despair. I choose hope. I choose beauty. I choose the ancient wisdom.
And if you feel all of those things belong in fiction, then that is your choice.
Mine is otherwise.
I choose not to waste my woodland walks in worrying. I choose not to sink beneath the slick of sorrow when I swim in imperfect seas. I choose to see the trees, shedding their golden autumn leaves. I choose to feel held by the waves. I choose, deliberately, to focus on the seeding, the growth, the harvests and the winter sleeping.
When the earth’s turn reaches its Autumnal Equinoctial Balance, I choose to pause. For that moment, that longer moment on either side of an astronomical split second, as we move from summer into autumn. I choose to harvest the summer of this year (each year as it comes), whether it has been arid or sodden, fruitful or stingy, whether it has delighted us with strange sightings of birds and butterflies that really “shouldn’t” be this far north, or here this late, or whatever it is we think we know, or whether it has merely given us our expected store of memories, to harvest what is feels more helpful to me, than to fret over what should have, could have, might have been. I choose to harvest this year, not the one my parents gathered in or lamented over lacking.
You may tell me that in good conscience I should write of other things. Of pain, of suffering, of death and desolation and destruction. I choose not to do so. I will leave that to those for whom such expression helps them, or who believe that fear is what will motivate us to change. I am not of that mind. My anger will only add to the sum of human misery; it will serve no good. If I sing only sad songs, it will simply deepen the pool of tears and none can drink from such salt water.
Tell me: when was the golden age? What re-set point have you chosen? Which technologies would you have me keep and which forsake? Rhetorical questions. Your answers depend upon your choices, your priorities, your medical or physical needs, your challenges in the world as it is. As do mine.
If we are not to exploit nature we are not to live. We eat of nature. We have tamed other animals to our use since the dawn of time, manipulated landscapes to our needs. And we are not the only species to do so. Whether it is survival of the fittest or the smartest or the most adaptable, there is always the other end of that equation, the elimination or enslavement of the weakest or the dumbest or the most inflexible.
If somewhere we crossed a line between the degree to which that exploitation was within acceptable parameters
and the one which exceeds them – and given what we see, that is a logical conclusion – then it raises the question: where was that line? Which was the step too far?
As we look at the old photographs, read the old stories, lament the cottages with their “The Old…” names, do we
want to return to those days?
As we sit in a village hall with all its spectral memory, I wonder which of us (at that time) would have lived to
the age we are now. I, most probably, would not. My family on one side were poor itinerant miners (tin before coal), and on the other quarrymen and farm-labourers, at times reliant on the Parish. Poor and dirt poor. I would not have been educated – unlikely to be able to read let alone write. Most probably, before this age I would have died in childbirth, or of hunger, or of hard work. I need only go back two generations to a time when, in my family, food was of necessity scavenged from the field edge and hedgerows – not for supplement, but for survival.
At best, if what they say of one of my grandmothers were true, I would have had a shack in the woods, I would have been taught the old knowledge. I would have been despised or feared, except when I was needed. At best I might have been a witch…and we know what they did to witches back then, in that golden age of sweat and sweet cider.
I cannot tell you where that line was, that we should not have crossed. Rather than lament its crossing, though, I choose to look for what was left behind that should have been brought forward. I choose to look for the places where it is being re-found, re-rooted. Community and common cause. Connection, to place as well as to people. Health and healing that comes directly from the world around us – not instead of modern medicine, or at least not always so. I would not go back, but equally, I would not lose all of what we (that mythical We) once knew.
You may mock my attachment to myth and magic, but Einstein pointed out that magic is only physics that we do not yet understand. And myth is simply another path to truth. I am not religious, but I am told that in the Talmud there is a verse which tells us that come the day of judgement we will be called to account for all the wondrous
things god put on this earth that we failed to enjoy.
I choose to enjoy them. Not because of that injunction, but simply because I can and because I know what a privilege that is. It is a privilege to be able to read, to write, to see the sunrise and the rain. It is a privilege to watch a vixen at play, to hear the geese returning, or see the swallows leave. It is a privilege to have the choices that we have, to spend our days walking, learning, seeking, to sit at evening and watch the owls quartering the field, rather than to fall into exhausted sleep the moment we put down our tools. It is a privilege to eat at will, to pick the berries because of their sweet taste and the memories they hold, rather than because we may starve without them.
I will write of sweet things. I will write of hope. I will write of my own experience of the world which, these days, is one of withdrawing from the fights I know I cannot win, one of retreating from my former lives, one of looking for the beauty that remains, catching the wisdom that still whispers on the wind, and sharing that. I will seek to celebrate the harvest, and to plant seeds that may grow.
I will try to show how the earth is still abundant and beautiful, how there is much to be grateful for, how good is
being done in the world, and hope to make one or two people think differently about it, to care more about what is around them in their modern every-day, to cherish it and nurture it and pass it on enhanced.
I will leave the shouting to others.
