Coming Soon: The Turning Year

 

An autumn morning begins with a walk through the woodland, waking with the first light and watching the sun find its way over the sea between the branches. At that hour, the woodland remains half held by night while the sea begins to catch the first light. The old image in the Rubáiyát comes to mind, of throwing a stone at the stars to drive the night away, though perhaps it is not so much the night we wish to chase away as the darkness within ourselves.

 

“Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:       

And Lo! The Hunter of the East has caught                       

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light”

 

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Translation by Edward FitzGerald, 1859)

 

Outside, the gulls quarrel and wheel above the roofs, the air carries the scent of woodsmoke and hay, and among the fading borders a few roses have found the strength to flower again after we had thought their season finished.

 

Perhaps it is these last offerings of summer that stay longest in the mind. An Indian summer afternoon can linger in the senses after the warmth itself has gone, and the rose that blooms out of season seems to possess a particular eloquence because we know the garden is already turning towards another time. 

 

In the rivers, the salmon are making their own extraordinary journey home.

 

After years spent growing in the open sea, they turn towards the freshwater rivers in which they were born, following the faint geography of scent back to their natal waters. 

They fight their way against the current, through rapids and over falls, spending the strength gathered during years of wandering. The journey is arduous, and yet the salmon continue upstream towards a place they have not seen since the beginning of their lives. The fishermen here call it simply going home.

 

I suppose that sometimes distance is needed before we recognise what has been waiting for us all along. This is why I understand something of what Camus meant when he wrote of travel awakening the desire for familiar things. 

There is a peculiar knowledge that comes from being away. We imagine that travel will make the world larger, and of course it does, but it also alters our understanding of what we have left behind. 

Perhaps we go away partly in order to discover what we cannot bear to lose.

 

“What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country … we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits … this is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing … Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”

― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951 

"All nature seems to weary now, her task is nearly ended,

And more of the seasons will come by and by.

When night comes on with song and tale we pass the wintry hours;

By keeping up a cheerful heart we hope for better days.

We tend the cattle, sow the seed, give work unto the ploughers,

With patience wait till winter yields before the sun's fair rays.

And so the world goes round and round, and every time and season

With pleasure and with profit crowns the passage of the year,

And so through every time of life, to him who acts with reason,

The beauty of all things doth appear."

 

Lyrics from The Seasons, Loreena McKennitt, from her beautiful 1987 album To Drive the Cold Winter Away, a treasured voice from Canada.

Hidden Harvests

 

"It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found." ~ D W Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971) ~

I have been thinking about Winnicott's words this month, particularly because August seems to me a month of promises, although not necessarily promises made to other people. They are the promises we make privately to ourselves about the lives we hope, one day, to live.

A dear friend of mine has recently decided to retire so that she can devote herself fully to the work she has always felt called towards. I admire her courage. She has always possessed an entrepreneurial spirit, and she has reached the point where working for herself seems likely to give her a deeper satisfaction than continuing to work for others.

 

What moved me most was her unwillingness to live with the question of what might have happened had she not tried.

So she decided that the time had come.

 

We celebrated her retirement together. G made the most delicious strawberry cake because strawberries are among her favourite things, and I found myself wondering what one might give a person who is not really retiring at all, but beginning again.

I eventually thought of a gift voucher and a cyanometer.

 

A cyanometer is a curious old instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky. The first was devised in 1789 by the Swiss physicist Horace Bénédict de Saussure. I liked the idea of giving her something so apparently unnecessary and yet so perfectly suited to her.

 

Blue is her favourite colour.

 

More than that, I liked the thought that the cyanometer might encourage her to look upwards. There will be days, inevitably, when the sky is obscured by cloud. But the blue has not disappeared. It is merely hidden.

There is something in that which seems to me worth remembering.

I often wonder about dreams myself. I wonder whether the life we are living is the only life available to us, or whether other possibilities continue to exist somewhere beyond our familiar boundaries.

 

What is a fulfilled life?

I have never known quite how to answer that question.

I admire my friend's courage, perhaps partly because I do not always possess it myself. I am rather fond of stability. The familiar has its consolations, and I know that I often retreat from the unknown before I have given it a proper chance.

 

What is it, I wonder, that enables one person to walk towards uncertainty while another turns instinctively towards safety?

Perhaps it is conviction.

Perhaps it is necessity.

Perhaps courage is not the absence of fear at all, but the discovery that there is something more important than fear.

 

I sometimes imagine the brave person as someone walking forward without hesitation, head held high, certain of the road ahead. 

Yet perhaps this is only how courage looks from a distance. Up close, it may look much less impressive. It may look like uncertainty, sleeplessness and second thoughts, followed nevertheless by one small step.

 

I am not sure that I want to prove anything by changing my life. There are times when I think contentment may be a more worthwhile ambition than reinvention. I do not particularly mind the path I have chosen, and I have no desire to abandon a life simply because another one might exist.

And yet life has a curious way of making us fluid.

We think we have settled, and then something changes. A friendship alters us. A place changes us. A book arrives at the right moment. Someone else takes a courageous step and, without intending to, makes us wonder about our own unopened doors.

I am full of contradictions. I have accepted this by now.

 

Perhaps that is not such a terrible thing. We are not required to remain intellectually consistent with every version of ourselves we have previously been. We are allowed to change our minds. We are allowed to want different things at different times. We are allowed to discover that the answer we gave ourselves last year was true then and is no longer quite true now.

Perhaps a life is not made coherent by having one unchanging desire, but by continuing to listen closely enough to know when something within us has altered.

My friend's decision has reminded me of this. Her courage does not tell me that I must do what she has done.

It simply reminds me that such courage exists.

 

Perhaps that knowledge is itself a kind of gift. We go through life imagining certain doors to be closed, until we see another person pass quietly through one of them. The door may not be ours to enter, but we are changed by knowing that it opens.

 

David Lloyd George — “Anything can be achieved in small, deliberate steps. But there are times you need the courage to take a great leap; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.”

 

And perhaps the greatest courage is not in remaking ourselves entirely, but in allowing what is deepest and truest within us to emerge at last from its hiding place and step quietly into the light.

Hidden Harvests

 

T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. I sometimes wonder whether August might be its gentler counterpart, the most generous of the year. By now the fields are ready for harvest, the apple orchards are heavy with fruit, and the landscape seems to offer up what it has been quietly preparing since spring.

 

There are mornings when I walk to the little cliff above the sea and sit alone for an hour, watching the fields and the changing light. Nothing is required of me there. Gradually the mind loosens its grip upon its small burdens, and I begin to feel once more in tune with myself, with the landscape, and with the larger rhythm of life.

 

One such morning, sitting beside a golden barley field beneath an almost impossibly clear sky, I found myself thinking about a sentence by John Eric Adair. 

After a lifetime spent observing people and what they might become, he wrote: 

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there."

 

I have returned to that thought more than once.

 

We often imagine that fulfilment must come from somewhere outside ourselves, as though courage, wisdom or purpose were things waiting to be acquired. 

Yet Adair suggests something more hopeful. Perhaps the most important things are not created at all. Perhaps they are already present, waiting to be recognised.

 

The fields seem to understand this. The harvest does not suddenly appear in August. It has been gathering itself for months, hidden beneath spring rain, summer sunlight and the ordinary passage of days. 

August merely reveals what was there all along.

 

I wonder if the same might be true of the places and people who restore us. They do not put something new into us so much as awaken what has been waiting there, reminding us of capacities and graces that may have lain dormant beneath the surface of our lives. 

A good friend may not give us courage but help us remember that we possess it. A beloved landscape may not create peace within us but make it easier to hear the peace that was already there.

 

Perhaps this is why I have begun to think of August not simply as the season of harvest, but as a season of recognition. 

The earth reveals what has been gathering within it since spring, each ripened field seeming like a blessing brought at last into the light.

 

And I find myself wondering whether our own lives may hold such hidden harvests too. There may be strengths we have not yet discovered, hopes that have not yet found their season, or possibilities still unfolding beyond our sight. 

The earth is patient with such things. It does not hurry the grain towards ripeness.

 

Perhaps we should extend ourselves the same kindness.

For what appears dormant is not necessarily lost, and what remains hidden may still be gathering strength in silence, waiting patiently for its moment to emerge. 

Willie Nelson's City of New Orleans, released by Columbia Records in 1984, is one of G's favourite albums. 

He often plays it when we are driving through the countryside, and somehow Nelson's weathered voice seems to belong to the open road, the wide fields and the long unhurried miles.

There is one particular verse, written by Dave Loggins from the album that always makes me smile.

We'll move up into the mountains so far that we can't be found

And throw "I love you" echoes down the canyon

And then, lie awake at night 'til they come back around