Autumn and fall,
Our nature's gateway into the inward-downward palpable pull of depth and how to come into deepest balance with ourselves and the earth.
Poem With a nosegay of decaying fungi,
Shmeagled in our hands like the bride of rot,
The natural year sighs and breathes out.
We stand at the centre of the double spiral where day equals night,
Dark equals light.
Pause to orient our bodies to the rhythms of darkness and quietude before we slowly walk the labyrinth inwards.
Nature,
Our favourite village auntie,
Shows us how to take stock,
Sidestep polarities,
Anxiety and overwhelm.
She shows us how to keep reaching for a dynamic fulcrum of balance as we gather in our second harvest,
Grieve our losses with grace,
Tip the scales towards generously finding in favour of ourselves and others.
Land a sweet spot of ease,
She guides our psyches past resistance to the long darkness ahead through a passage of wonders,
A brand new palette of rich,
Ripened colours.
The hedgerows burgeoning with sloughs,
Rosehips and brambles,
Purple-black elderberries,
Scarlet-red rowanberries and haws for the birds.
She consoles us with caches of light and sustaining beauty left for us to find,
Like squirrel nutting in the windy sunshine.
Raven caw-caws in the chill morning,
Ascending from the ancestors to bring our awareness into sharper focus.
On our daily earthwalks,
Nature's wisdom medicine beckons to us from everywhere.
Over here,
Whispers the forest floor with its frosty musk musty down the cellar smell of moist loam,
Leave the path for the deeper woods,
Come and see the hamlets of mushrooms breaking down the tree stumps and mossy logs.
Like ours,
Your body is just the fruit,
Beneath the ground are miles of mycelium are making a million meaningful connections.
Expand your human consciousness beyond your present death-spiral impasse,
Evolve wisdom.
Even if you haven't done everything you wanted to with your life,
Your body at death will be a tasty smorgasbord of nutrients for the earth.
Death is also home,
Dear friend.
Over here,
Over here,
Change is done for you,
Not to you,
Swish the trees,
Who have become their own surgeons to perform the marvel of abscission on their leaves.
For weeks,
They have been creating lines of perforations between their branches and leaf stems so their leaves will more easily tear off like notelets in the blustery wet squally gusting winds of change.
Over here,
Over here,
Call those leaves twirling to the ground,
Pause to witness our final dance,
See how we flare and bleach out in a straggled strewn about finish,
Hold nothing of ourselves back,
Search long and hard for something in nature that is not necessary to another,
And you will find nothing.
Oblide summer hearts gather on the telephone wires with the swallows and house martins restless to be gone.
They tell us much about what we are capable of before we settle into winter's heavy bosom.
At the same time,
Our wide-winged downy-bodied autumn souls return with the geese.
They arrive in V-shaped skeins to winter and feed on the tranquility of the estuaries,
Wetlands and marshes.
Here in South West Scotland,
Pink-footed barnacle and light-bellied brent geese,
Wading birds,
Winter wildfowl and hooper swans from Greenland,
Siberia,
Iceland and the Arctic,
Even their names and the countries they have come from circle in the morning air,
Touch our longing for freedom,
For the necessities of our daily lives to be filled with hallowed light and simplicity.
And Heron,
What about her,
Who is perseverance and patience incarnate?
Over here she beckons towards her impassive reflection,
Over here.
However long she has had to wait,
Nothing distracts her from the precision with which she executes her intention.
And what about Spider,
Queen of creativity?
To what in us does she speak when she exposes her abdomen to the night air,
Casts out her webbing with atophistic abandon,
Waits to feel it attach to a distant thing,
A star or a feeling idea she longs to reel in?
Her spiral dance is choreographed to perfection with construction genius that should make human engineers weep.
She maintains almost flawless concentric measure with just one of her legs.
And then,
In the misty mornings,
She leaves hundreds of ground cobwebs draped over the heather,
Bejewelled in dew to enrapture us.
In the gloaming,
Gnarled hawthorn trees are ancient grandmothers casting shadows onto their crochet hooks.
Their familiars,
Badger and Fox,
Return to them at day's end from their forages.
We knit our autumn colour lust into woolly warmth,
Scarves cosy hats,
A long cardigan with deep pockets,
Bring in the wood,
Stock up the shelves,
Press fallen apples,
Make ready for the autumn kitchen goddess,
Pile up the squashes and marrows,
Make soup,
Root crumbles and chunky stews,
Experiment with baking kale crisps.
We rummage for the box of last year's candles,
Harvest our seeds,
Squash,
Sunflower and sweet pea,
Dry our herbs and replenish our apothecary with nettle seeds,
Red sage for sore throats,
Dandelion root as a liver tonic.
Silence drapes its shawl over our shoulders.
We seek out stories with warmth and girth for our newly established hearth,
Root again and again in the hope that is dependent on nothing but itself and the numinous,
Which is our burrow,
Our web,
Our one home.
