”Down to Earth then sinks the sun”
It’s here again. The time of the year when the fingers of the coming Autumn tap me on my shoulder. When the sky feels heavier and the sun slower. A time, for me, of remembering trauma and of slow feet, fast tears and …something else.
I felt it today when I was out in the garden and covering up my cold frame until the next growing season begins again in Spring. A feeling in my chest, that spread through the rest of my body. A feeling that I know intimately but also have never really owned. As I pottered around with the last of the evening sun warming my face and arms, the yearning began. It’s a strange nostalgia, a sense of things slowing down and getting ready to sleep for the Winter to come, a picture in my mind of a Winter spent being burrowed and cosy and rested. A nostalgia for the waning sun bathing the land around me in subtle yellows and oranges as things get tidied and gathered. It’s a real visceral sadness, like the feeling you get when you’ve been to an amazing festival and know that you now have to pack up your tent and go home to face another normal week, leaving behind the magic of what you have just experienced.
This feeling of nostalgia isn’t really rooted in any real life experience, I didn’t grow up in some little English village where we drank ginger beer and got up to escapades amongst the stone cottages and wheat fields, I grew up in suburbia on the outskirts of Manchester, but when we get to this point in the year, my heart suddenly reverts to this yearning. It’s a bitter sweet feeling. One laced with love but also incredible melancholy. A very heady mixture. ‘Day is Done by Nick Drake is the perfect musical materialisation of this sensation.
I don’t really know what purpose it serves to have my brain start to pump out this intoxicating mix but it brings with it an awareness, something that I’m tippy toeing to reach and almost touching, like I’m just about to discover the meaning of it all and then I get drawn back into reality. Those little slots of time outside of time are when I feel at my most magical and at one with everything. It’s a time of looking outwards and feeling actual proper contentment but the moment I look at it, it feels me looking and it slips away.
As it arrived today and I turned my face into the lazy sunshine, I got a sense of gratitude and wonder. Look how beautiful it all really is, a voice in my head told me it’s plain really, the tree dropping its leaves doesn’t question the cycle, it doesn’t try to cling on to what needs to be let go of. The Earth carries on with its trip around the Sun, no fighting itself to stay in the warmth. They know everything is as it should be. They trust the process.
A reminder for me, for us all. Magic is in the lack of resistance. Stop pushing, stop hankering for what can no longer be or what no longer is needed. KISS-Keep it simple, stupid.
The Hermits Grove 