autumn

season shift – completion

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

I’m here in the garden listening to the piano music I recorded while I was away on the business trip (at the airport, and you can hear the airport mini trucks beeping here and there, as well as airport hubbub and occasional announcements).

It’s the last day I will be able to sit like this in the garden this year. At the weekend the picnic tables and chairs and benches will be stored for the winter.

As so often happens, the moment itself is not as difficult as the anticipation of the moment.

The sun is shining, the wind is mild and the flowers and plants wave around me.

All that I have lived in this miraculous garden this summer is welling up within me. The sheer surprise of it, the gift of its unimaginable beauty, the joy of the comings and goings of other gardeners, the sweet events of afternoon teas, meditation with someone who might become special to me, birthday celebration with old friends and new neighbours, semi-adopting the sweet cats, picking, delighting in and sharing flowers, running here first after trips away, to check on my plants, to be home.

Sometimes life is difficult but sometimes grace effuses itself from who knows where and overwhelms the pains with its unexpected, astonishing beauty.

Such has been this garden to me in a quite wild summer, inside me, around me, and beyond me in the world which sometimes feels like it is collapsing under the weight of its own pains, its own lostness.

At the start of the summer I pondered whether the rhythm of this garden would help me restore ‘the studio inside’. It has. It has been the most exquisite open-air studio anyone could wish for. Now it is going to be allowed to rest while already I have been provided with a ‘real’ indoor studio. What grace again.

The music is ending, but, in a way I love so much, it ends on a note of incompleteness, an interrupted cadence, a kind of resolution with expansion in prospect, a generosity to what will come next…

season shift II

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Finding the right position for the season shift is ongoing. This week has been somewhat severe in its insistence on change. The neighbours have returned to their apartment and I can no longer play the piano in the mornings. This week turned extremely cold with blustery rain, making my garden writing starts impossible. I have client projects beginning which take up substantial space in the week’s schedules, and I am wondering where to place and how to find time for the delicacy and sensitivity of writing, pondering, persisting, discovering. I had to retrieve various jumpers, tights and coats from the attic and the light garments of summer are soon to be banished to make space for them. Somehow these things also coincided with the unexpected completion of a writing project that has been going on for three years. Another one is starting but the disappearance, all of a sudden, of the previous project’s routine was a shock.

As you can see I have not quite come to a contentment in and embrace of autumn.

And yet I do love autumn joys. What is it that is clinging on inside me? An unspoken disappointment? Fear? A kind of seasonal abandonment making me feel bereft?

I’m being invited to surrender and I don’t want to. The season to come is going to be more demanding than the season I am leaving. It’s a fact.

Is it a fact?

As I write I peer into winter’s darkness I can see it as if lit up with a path of candlelight. This image of light is all the more striking this year as one of the themes of my work and life has been disruption over lighting. I will not go into it more here, but the very perception of a path of lights entices me a little, stirring a desire that has been starkly absent, refusing to emerge.

Hmmm a lit path… lit as if guiding a path to a beautiful place, though at night.

Perhaps this is the invitation I need to find a way through.

season shift

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Here in northern Europe there is an undeniable season shift.

I am not always good in seasonal transitions. Sometimes I drag my heels, severely reluctant to embrace something new, even spring. Perhaps especially spring with its vulnerability and newnesses.

A few weeks ago I went though an episode of not-enough-summer panic. This happens to me when the sunny days of summer have not amounted to enough to banish the severity of winter from my being, something that is more pressing when winters cling on into April and even May. This year it was more ferocious because of working relentlessly in June, so that my actual summer felt like it did not start til mid-July whereupon it coincided with wild winds and tempestuous days and finding myself ill in the only sunny ones.

Anyhow, as is the way of things, the panic turned out to be completely unfounded because I recovered to find myself tipped into a month of seeming endless sunshine, festivals, picnics, swimming and holiday. I am replenished in deep places and have a moment to contemplate autumn.

Somehow my replenishment seems to be contested. It really is there, I am certain, but doubts seem to circle around. I want to give myself over to autumn, to the thrills small – new stationery, new fashions redolent of school uniform – and large – wild projects, startling insights, new initiatives.

I am finding my way into the right position to surf the wave of autumn. My ambitions feel like they wildly outstrip the meagreness of chronological time, a perennial dilemma. But, as I tell myself, it is all in the positioning. So I write my way into this approach and that, testing things.

I want to embrace and delight in this season from the deep contentment, from a peaceful inner order. It feels like a kind of maturity and a sign of my own new inner harmony.

So I have been clearing some spaces and taking care of things and not letting new projects run away with themselves, but serve the older yet equally important places of consolidation and honouring existing commitments.

And writing my way into the right inner posture, taming myself.

a very golden sunlight

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

a very golden sunlight
shafts suddenly across leaves
yellowed with glowing
oldness.
Illuminates memory,
gilding years of
subtle pain,
revealing glories
yet unknown,
to come, yes, to come,

the cold grass is dappled
for a moment,
warm here and there.

the red squirrel pauses
with its golden acorn,
tentative, suddenly
awareness rich,
hesitant to scurry
to store its treasure
for another day.

gone grey a moment,
mundanity takes
back its familiar
places, but not forever;
a golden knowing lingers.

moonlight conker

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

In the blackness
scuff leaves searching
for autumn treasure,
crouch down
nearer to the ground.
(Risk of being run over.)
Is that a gleam
of brown sheen?
Tipsy with delight,
I dart and seize
a conker.

Note to poem: As a child, conkers were highly prized.  The nearest chestnut tree to our school was inevitably frequented by children who lived nearby, leaving me and my brothers with a much-diminished chance of finding our own unblemished fruit. As an adult, I live near a horse-chestnut tree myself and still feel the wonder of a continual abundance of conkers at all times of day, but especially night.