Nature’s objective is not to complete
But to re-become
Again, and again

Brianna Wiest
from Salt Water, page 44

Yes! the multi-coloured foliage of all our lives falls to earth and water, regular as clockwork. That’s the norm. We waste our energy trying to resist the passage of time and season. We renew our energies when – and if – we learn the wisdom of the soul and the seasonal. There is, indeed, a time for everything under the sun. When our personal ‘flowers’ are brought to the ground we should, perhaps, breathe a sigh of relief. Here’s a fallow period. A rest. Downtime. Like my oxalis triangularis corms – covered up in a dark cupboard for a while to regain their strength – so it is for us: we’re not to complete, but to re-become. Wow!

I often overhear passers-by the front of my cottage asking ‘I wonder what it’s called?’ Tonight, towards the end of the season, a single mildly scented rose called ‘Compassion’ (link) brings attention-grabbing colour to the front of the house and sometimes slows the pace a little as it beckons people nearer …

Chillier evenings as Autumn draws on were made, I think, for fireside and books. And rather wonderfully, after a sunshiny day, it’s a chilly evening! …

what is it in lake
ocean or river that brings
us to a standstill?

By ‘eck it were blowin’ on the fabulous long beach at St Anne’s today. My face is glowing and my lungs are full to the brim with good clean Lancashire air. In the first photo here I tried to capture the whoosh and movement involved in the wind’s blowing, drying and pushing hard across the surface of the beach. Broken shells acted as little sand dams and looking at them from above we imagined we were seeing something similar to a newly rediscovered ancient civilisation – an entire buried city brought to life before our eyes by a stiff Lancashire wind. In the second, the mackerel sky suggested rain for tomorrow. Whipped and chilled by the wind today, it was wonderfully sunny!

A poet is a person who “lets drop a line that gets remembered in the morning” 

E B White

And that’s what we all want – a being re-membered, re-clothed, re-plenished, re-sourced, re-born and re-cognised in the morning, and every morning … and as we grow we come to recognise with a deep cognisance that it’s absolutely OK to “drop the line” at evening, because we’re wholly confident – here and in all the vast and tiny uni-verse of our eternities – that there will be a remembering in the morning …

Some poets say they’ll go on strike
and damn it the interest rate
has gone to pot again and it
might rain and that will wreck your now
unaffordable hairdo and
your flimsy blue paper mask too –
what to do Prime Minister – tell
me will you what to bloody do?

This woman looked at oxalis
triangularis and picked
up her pencil and began to
draw – for she knows the score that with
breakfast news you can swallow it
and suffer or instead turn to
muse-create and think of a date
for rendez-vous and masked picnic

The news sponge looks grey – past knowing
what to do or say – while pencilled
oxalis triangulates on
paper and her interested
eyes lead the artist to surmise
that attention given to a
fragile leaf must change someone’s mood

For the better

David Whyte speaks of ‘the intimacy of your surroundings’ in his ‘Everything is Waiting for You’ – and thereby changed the way I look at life and our world; at a robin, morning mist hung low over the Pennine Ridge at sunrise, a blade of grass, a waxy leaf, the smile of a food hall cashier, the warmth contained in a person’s expressed hopes, spent energy, graced art, delights, desires, grief or pain.

I celebrate the intimacy of my surroundings at home, in the volumes on my library shelves, in growing compost, in oceans, and the great bodies of water in English Lakeland, in who and what I am, in memories, supper, and plans for tomorrow. And I am not alone …

There’s a distinct nip in the air this morning and condensation is blurring the view from the windows here. Everyone I’ve seen has been bright and cheerful – the (very real) concerns of C-19 life in the UK giving way to blue skies, crisp air, freshness and – well – whatever it is that makes us leap up and out and about with enthusiasm on a day like today.

William Stafford reflected in an autumn-sort-of-a-way in his ‘Vocation‘ (link)

Now both of my parents, the long line through the plain,
the meadowlarks, the sky, the world’s whole dream
remain, and I hear him say while I stand between the two,
helpless, both of them part of me:
“Your job is to find what the world is trying to be.”

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees …

John Keats

Autumn mornings like this one have me up from bed and off downstairs, barefoot, to stand for a few moments on the bejewelled grass – and be thankful …

I’m fond of Border Terriers – chiefly because their faces are so expressive. I came across two of them with their human earlier. Each little face – without words – was quite clearly saying: ‘let’s go on adventures.’ And it occurred to me that their freedom of spirit is precisely why they always look so cheerful, and up for whatever’s coming their way. So look out. When we meet I’ll want to chat about what adventures we’ve got lined up!

Chatting with a friend over lunch today touched upon the beauty of ‘Austen-esque’ language. Full of words and modes of speech that have become rather old-fashioned to contemporary ears, Jane Austen’s classics are no less loved by me for that.

One such word, at least one that I don’t often hear, is ‘enthralled’ – which really quite describes me! On the one hand I’ve begun to believe myself a bit forgetful, and on the other I’m enjoying a kind of renaissance-return to the beguiled delights of curious childhood, before ‘education’ and ‘what you need to do now’ interrupted my reverie.

Today I find myself glad again to have time to take time – and observe that there’s a great deal to have one’s attention held by – often tiny things. Pasja1000 created this marvellous photograph of a single lawn daisy and I am, Miss Bennet, ‘enthralled’ by all that I see (and hear?) in it.