Today is grey and overcast in England’s Northern Lake District. After weeks of intense heat and scorched earth, the clearer, cooler air feels like a gift. The hills have softened. The fields seem to be breathing again. In hedgerows the berries are beginning to colour, and I find my thoughts turning towards autumn: mist rising from the valleys, Martindale’s bracken taking on its copper glow, the first leaves loosening their hold on the trees. The year is beginning to change its mind about summer. I welcome it.
There is something in autumn’s willingness to let go that has been speaking to me since my mother died two whirlwind weeks ago. A tree does not cling to every leaf simply because it has loved the summer. It releases what has served its season, and makes room for whatever comes next. Nature seems to possess an instinct for surrender that we humans spend much of our lives learning. Like mine, my mother’s life had its own seasons, each one asking something different of her. At 90, she came to the threshold of another kind of letting go. Being beside her brought me close to the mystery of it, to a deep sense of rightness in allowing a life to complete its own season, to thankfulness for the memory of her suntanned, windblown smile on our happy Mediterranean cruise together – and innumerable other remembrances.
Perhaps this is part of what autumn offers us each year: a quiet invitation both to remember, and to loosen our grip. There are possessions, habits, and ambitions to put down, each having served its time and purpose. There are things to receive, too: cooler mornings, darker evenings, the extraordinary colours of decay, the pleasure of walking beneath trees whose leaves are already preparing to fall. I want to meet this autumn awake to all of it. To appreciate it. To release what has finished. To make room, willingly, for the seasons and the bestirring that are coming. Morning mist rising – gradually sharpening into focused human detail.
Ninety years and six months have brought her here. Daughter. Sister. Beloved wife. Faithful friend. Mother of three – two sons and a daughter. Mother in law. Sister in law. Cousin. Aunt. Grandmother and Great-grandmother. A woman of many gifts. Steady hands. A Christian faith worn lightly and lived deeply.
Our mother loved abundantly. Her parents and siblings. Our father and his family. Friends, neighbours, children, grandchildren. Love seemed to come as naturally to her as breathing, in every hour of every season.
Her hands made our childhood clothes and – later – uniforms, play-wear, trousers, jackets, summer dresses and wedding gowns. And baked countless scones and cakes, held children, comforted friends, tapped out time in a million songs sung. Hands often folded in prayer.
Her heart was full upon being named Honorary President of the choir she has loved for forty years. She loved the things of God and sought to represent her Creator’s love well. She loved her parish church. She loved her priest, and told him so. She loved and was always interested in her neighbours – every one of them, young and old.
These hands and this heart have done their work.
And now the room has become very still. Nursing ‘angels,’ and holy archangels, come and go, and their extraordinary kindnesses bring a lump to my throat and healing tears to my eyes, and to our mother’s.
Time feels different here. It gathers itself around small things. A hand held. Eyes opening for a moment. A familiar voice. The quiet rhythm of breathing. A treasured friend tells me that these are blessed moments of ‘witnessing.’ I hear and know that.
Family and friendship are present here, too. Distance, or lack of words, have become no object in the heartfelt nearness and quietness of the hour.
I am full of thanks, just as my mother has been and, beneath her changing presence, still is.
Our lives are usually measured by beginnings. We celebrate arrivals. We announce achievements. We hurry towards whatever comes next.
Very little prepares us for mortal illness, or for the grace of accompanying someone as they come to the end of a long and faithful life. Very little, except for acceptance, or faith, or love, or trust, or all of these, prepares us for coming to the end of our own.
R S Thomas, late Vicar of Aberdaron, wrote of ‘the bright field.’ I think of those words often now. Perhaps every life of love leaves a bright field behind – somewhere others enter, finding themselves changed by the encounter, without ever quite knowing why.
I have seen the sun break through to illuminate a small field for a while, and gone my way and forgotten it. But that was the pearl of great price …
And the poet Mary Oliver asked what we would do with our ‘one wild and precious life.’
Our mother answered with ordinary days – with compassion, with creativity, with delight, with empathy, with forgiveness, with gratitude, with hospitality, and with kindnesses offered before they were asked for. With birthday cards and Christmas cards. With her bird-feeders faithfully restocked. With prayers no one else heard – and especially in recent years, for her beloved sister and her family. With faith that remained steady through changing seasons, and all of us ageing. With family gathered around tables and Sunday roasts, or beach rugs and sandwiches.
Outside the birds are singing.
The swallows still cross the sky. Mum’s birds still pour themselves into the morning. The world continues, generous as ever.
I have always loved that.
Creation receives each generation, carries us for a while, then entrusts the world to other hands.
This bedside has become a place of quiet gratitude.
Sorrow has its place. So does peace.
I look at a face shaped by ninety years.
I look at, and hold hands that have loved well.
Some lives leave books.
Some leave buildings.
Some leave themselves in other people.
In otherpeople – trusting each of us to represent well something of the essence of who they’ve always been, and will be; embracing all of their and our so-called ‘human failings,’ and all of their and our so-called ‘human successes.’
Yes: some leave themselves in other people.
In you and me.
And – through us – in the embrace of Immortal Love.
Edinburgh’s sea haar rolls oe’r the land in silence softly touching all
Edinburgh’s sea mist, which arrives rolling as surprise, with stealth, and in silence, is restful to tired eyes. It carries a soft damp chill, like breath in a snowy landscape, or a kneeling to retrieve fruit from a freezer. It’s Edinburgh character. It’s gift. It’s a picture. It’s reminder of the rolling panoply of nature-imbued life. And watching the landscape going and coming, and coming and going, softened, and thereby refreshed, it’s as though one were summoned by love.
Happy are they for whom haar-softened edges come to show the world anew
I’ve enjoyed a lovely afternoon with one of my Lakeland neighbours today – a good catch-up generally, and a sharing of our love for gardens and sunlight illuminating flower and leaf particularly. Buds still tight on my beloved acer tree have, in the last 24 hours, opened into fresh and beautiful leaf, and as for the blossoms and flowers in my friend’s garden … they’re spellbinding! The first and the last photos here were made in my garden. The others, in his.
I can’t remember quite when, but it was only a little while ago that a bit of research led me to the discovery that the word ‘petrichor’ speaks of the wonderful scent that delights us after heavy rain meets soil after a long period of dry weather.
My bare hands have been working in the soil of raised beds until past dusk this evening and – in the liminal spaces that are a happy feature of light gardening – I’ve been aware of three things:
Of petrichor. The soil, loosened, raked and weeded, albeit in the absence of heavy rain, released a quite lovely scent – a touch of coal tar, perhaps a drop of creosote? – something, anyway, that smelled different, healthy, and unusual. I was glad of it.
Of a robin. How is it that robins appear to be talking to us when we set about even minimal works in a garden? This one’s little head cocked from side to side, his tail rocking up and down. He looked thoroughly interested and I don’t quite know how that can be so – how his little face is so expressive. I am glad of it, too.
Of bacteria. Especially of that particular bacteria that soil apparently nurtures – which, I learned last week, when coming into contact with bare human hands, releases dopamine in them. Here, in part, is what makes us happy when we’re pottering about in gardens – along with a wide sky, the scent of the lawn, apple blossoms, green shoots, the gradual stilling of post-dusk birdsong, and yes, the scent of the glad, the perfume – on such an evening – of the gratefully content.
not to produce some thing but just to acknowledge the good in painting
the brush moves without urgency and colours touch listening paper
and my listening and that of paper and brush colour memory
and in the quiet something of silence settles deeper than colour
Before colour becomes form, before brush becomes movement, there is a moment of stillness where everything listens. And in that stillness, and in that listening, in mere wisp of movement, in the slightest glance into light – a gently persistent voice invites me to attend to ‘something … deeper than colour’
sunshine and fresh air are great motivators for spring cleaning and art
By late Sunday afternoon I felt the contented tiredness of used window-cleaning muscles, the companionship of a colourful and imaginary friend working in the garden with me, coffee and crayons, and the mental satisfaction of some seasonal jobs now accomplished.
Down the dusty slope to the long sweep of gold sand and the beach café’s garlic gambas and Pablo’s distinctively rich dark brown coffee where the chief scent of the morning
is of suncream and warmed skin and quiet conversation is accompanied by out-of-control symphonies of wind-blown wires thrashing the masts of a rainbow of
sailboards – and yes – we come here every year to tell again of the turquoise and the turtles and shyly aware faithfulness to-a-fault to these times and to these hot
prawns and coffee like this and even to the same sun oil and quieting stilling soothing murmur of the ocean of love and abiding in hearts and souls that know
one another so well that the shoreline paddling and the holding hands and the light and the deep and the sad and the funny conversation and affectionate and
glad recollection will carry us both – after our falling into the deepest of deep sleeps – unto shoreline and sunshine of our universal eternity
