I associate the first half of September with painful muscle memories of returning to school for the start of the new academic year. That dreaded countdown to the end of the summer holidays… a slow but intense process of loss. Now it’s the waning warmth and hours of daylight. The demise of peaceful silence as the hum of activity and traffic re-clutter mornings. Leaves, not long ago the fresh green of youth, yellow and fall like aging teeth while flower heads darken and shrivel shedding their petals like hair.  

(As you can see, my mood and thoughts plummet in September! Early September that is. It gets better though, if you care to read on…)

Expanded thoughts stretching lazily into the great outdoors are reined in. Earth’s gravitational pull sucks sap and life forces back into its bosom, simultaneously draining me of mine. I grieve the death of summer. My optimism falters. It requires an act of will to stop my spirits from sinking into a deep, weary sigh.  

Dying… death, the sole inevitable event in each of our lives, yet about which we know so little and only talk reluctantly. 

As if mirroring the fading light and life in nature, death in various guises fell close to home during the last months. The natural passing of a dear, elderly godfather. The sudden, wholly tragic demise of the 14-year-old son of close friends of my sister’s family. Further afield but landing in our days nonetheless, the nameless numbers of violent deaths from conflicts or upturned boats. And in my regular dips into churches and cathedrals while walking the 215-mile Severn Way, I encounter those who have long gone, some preserved in perpetuity in grand tombs, others lost in overgrown cemeteries.

Still clinging to my scanty summer wardrobe while shivering in stubborn refusal to turn on the heating, everything changes for me as we pass through the portal of the Equinox and turn the corner into autumn. The sense of loss and gradual dying shift into a graceful letting go; an embracing of our interior worlds and the gifts of the encroaching darkness that, like the tide, cannot be stopped. The worst period of mourning is over.

Earlier this week I was privileged to witness a beautiful example of joy and laughter in the wake of loss and grief. It came in the form of a fellow visitor to the Museum of Royal Worcester. Cabinets of china artefacts do not belong to my usual aesthetic, but I was there with my 90-year-old mother for whom they do. In a far room, sitting at a table covered in brushes and bottles of ceramic paints, a woman, maybe in her sixties, sat with her head bent over a bare clay mug impressed with an owl design. I soon learned that she had come here to honour her late parents, with whom she had always lived, in the most profound way she could think of. As lovers of porcelain themselves, they would have been beyond overjoyed to see the cups, bowls, vases and ornaments on display. Now, she was painting an owl mug for each of them, carefully outlining the wings in darker slip and stopping her excited chat to concentrate on the beak or pupils. She shone with the simplicity and profundity of her action. It touched me deeply. She was doing a far better job of overcoming a far greater loss than I had been with my summertime blues.

Then a cool night in my camper van with the visceral thrust of Severn Bores pushed and pulled upstream and over the banks by a full moon boldly rising in defiance of the descending sun. Reminders that the deep in- and out- breaths of the tidal river are part of the larger breaths of the Earth, the Seasons, Nature, Life… and Death.

Reminders that nothing is either lost or dead. That all is well and all will come again. 

Welcome to you, Autumn, with all your outer splendour and inner hope!