During the nine days before Christmas, many South American communities re-enact the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, pausing each day at designated ‘inns’ to pray. Some of the base communities founded during the development of Liberation theology also use the time to reflect on some of the big questions of life on earth - why is there poverty and homelessness? What does it mean to be a refugee? What causes war? What is happening to the earth we live in? The dark nights around the solstice are a good time do something similar.
Treeline
It is the quiet, stripped down time of the year. The leaves are off the trees now and you can see the structure of the woodland and the garden. The recent frosts have killed off the last marigolds and flattened most of the garden foliage, yet the cold has also jolted the violets and primroses into thinking it might be spring, and we do have a few flowers, with a deep colour and a very powerful scent. The intensity of the dark purple of my violets has an odd water-like gleam against the green leaves - it reminds me of the ancient Greek simile for a quiet sea - ‘violet-like’, implying not so much a hue, but the sensation of hidden depths under a surface glitter. There has been a lot of rain and a lot of wind. The birds have hunkered down apart from the magpies and wood pigeons and the sparrows are staying close to home. We have even had a little - a very little snow.
Every day seems shorter now, and the shops are all changing gear. Hallowe’en is a big thing here, and the houses will be decked in orange ribbons, pumpkins arranged on the doorsteps, and soon the gardens will be full of giant spider webs, crime scene tape, skeletons, ghosts, bats and witches. We have already stocked up for guisers, who come in waves from about half past five, little ones with parents or older siblings, who all have tacky songs and terrible jokes (which they can’t always remember), older ones later, who chance their arms ‘trick or treating’ and often find the sweets have gone already.
Notes from the Lookout Regular newsletter from a herb garden in a new-build housing estate overlooking the Clyde Valley.
#Plantsplacepoetry
Season of the Crossroads
The season We are coming close to the autumn equinox, the tipping point of the year. From now until March there will be more dark than light, and the air is full of movement and change. Everyone is back from their summer holidays, new terms start in schools and universities, summer migrants are leaving and the first pink-footed geese are already here. It’s the second harvest - the vintage - the fruit trees are bearing and bee-keepers are taking honey, and as the gardening season winds down we are beginning to reckon up how it went, and where we go next. We are at a cross-roads moment, a pivotal moment for reflection and reorientation. My own spiritual tradition has tended towards the cerebral and abstract in recent history, but I notice that our liturgy is more embedded in the seasons than I thought and we are making the same movement into the dark half of the year, thinking about the journey to Jerusalem, invoking the guardianship of angels, reflecting on the central motif of the cross, and moments of commitment to the way ahead. It’s a time for re-evaluating, and I will certainly be doing a lot of that as I go into the fourth year of living here, and the new writing that comes out of it.
Lugnasadh (1st August) - also known as Lunastal or Lammas - stands more or less for the start of the grain harvest and there are all kinds of harvest/earth mother goddess vibes about it. In the yearly cycle of readings of my own tradition, many of them feature either harvests, or farm work, or feasting of various kinds - all eyes are on the fields. It’s a busy time!
Over the fields to the Ochils
Where I used to live, we were surrounded by fields of wheat and barley and I didn’t realise how much I missed seeing the wind across the crop making it ripple like the muscles under the skin of a long-haired cat, or the thin chatter and bustle of sparrows and finches gleaning the fallen grain, the swallows and skylarks coasting the air. But here we mostly have tall hedges, sheep and horses. Even when there are cornfields you can’t see them from a car. The nearest we got to it was when we mowed the wild edges of our lawn. About a million sparrows and juvenile starlings descended on the path where the seedheads dropped and the neighbours’ cats suddenly got very interested in our garden.
We are on the threshold of summer now, and the weather is steadily warming up - and about time, too. It hasn’t been quite as wet here as in some places, but spring has seemed very slow to arrive. It was just last week that there was a rush of sap to stem, and all the leaves opened and the perennials bulked up, and the garden became green instead of earthy. Now the greenhouse is full of seedlings, and I have a propagation area just beside it with plants waiting for me to find a space. Daffodils and tulips are over, but the first iris is in flower, a soft white one, and the first rose buds have appeared on the Tuscany Superb - always the first to perform. We found an empty eggshell on the patio yesterday, softly blue and less than two centimetres long, probably a dunnock’s, as I’ve seen a pair growing bolder in the garden this year. Other birds are frantically feeding chicks, trees are putting out blossom and the hedgerows have moved from primrose to cowslip and cuckoo flower.
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