Blackberrying
Dear Friend,
We are in that liminal moment when summer ends and autumn begins.
Sex, abundance, melancholy, and harvest, become mingled.
This week, I rewatched The Swimmer, a film based on a John Cheever story.
The premise is simple: one midsummer day, the main character decides to swim all the way from a party to his own home via the private pools of his neighbours.
As his journey continues, he becomes confused about the basic details of his life, about his wife and daughters, and about what day (and even year) it is.
By the end of the story, he notices bare trees, darkening skies, and the scents of autumnal flowers that seem out of place in June.
Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigoldsโsome stubborn autumnal fragrance on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.
In The Swimmer, time collapses, or goes missing, and the story ends on a note of haunting ambiguity.
On this monthโs Folkways podcast, there is an interview with alternative folklorist Thomas Sheridan on the Irish sidhe (fairies) and their dark appeal. Not to be confused with the more benign fae, these fairies kill, steal, and seduce.
There are countless stories of the sidhe and missing time when people, especially children, are taken to fairyland for indeterminate periods. Often, these stories begin with the eating of fairy food.
Blackberries are considered fairy food. If you eat the share belonging to the pรบca, a mischievous spirit, you risk being taken to fairyland forever.
This sense of missing time is a wonderful story spur, and one we will be working with in Atmospheres this week. If you want to write along, you can immerse in the Virgo II potion here, for free.
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Virgo II is the season of Blackberrying.
Kening Zhuโs dreamy illustration captures the shift between the gold of summer and the cooler green of autumn. The brambles encircle a fairy castle, where Sleeping Beauty wastes a hundred years or more. In some versions of this tale, she sleeps after eating fairy food or being tricked into eating human flesh.
Virgo II is about late summer slipping into autumn. Melancholy and heavy ripeness. Delicious fruits that mark the end of the harvest.
It is something sour and sharp. Deliciously tart.
The potion captures much more of the abundance and melancholy of this season, and you can find it here.
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If you would like to join us for the first live ritual of Atmospheres, Blackberrying, we will be meeting online at 7pm BST on Thursday 11th September. You can join here.
Why join Atmospheres?
The intangible element that elevates a piece of writing to an artwork is contained in its atmosphere.
No one reads for technique; we read to become immersed in a world unlike our own.
Atmosphere is what is imprinted in that experience.
Atmospheres is a container for paying attention to the tiny, so that we can understand the vastness of the cosmos and all its patterns, including the ones that make compelling stories.
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๐ Fruit (things that are ready to share)
A post about Blackberrying.
A potion on Blackberrying.
I have also written about the Nine of Pentacles, and Abundance, Witchcraft + Pleasure, here.
That liminal moment when summer ends and autumn begins: sex and abundance and regret and harvest mingled. Heartbreaking colours that look peaceful on the surface, but reveal an ambivalent depth: sublime and numinous
๐ฆ Spores (tiny ideas)
I have been working on a method to support writers who are planning a complex project. I devised Story Constellations โ a way to use the zodiac to plan a story. This is a work in progress, and I have started in the middle (corresponding to Virgo).
๐๐๐ Mycelium (relational networks)
Kening Zhuโs new mystery school for creativity, Labyrinth, is open for registration.
it is my invitation for you to learn how to be truly comfortable walking in the dark โ to cultivate the courage to trust what you can feel, but canโt see. to tending to your own wounds, lighting your own fire, and finding your own way.
If you are called to understanding the deep mysteries of the creative process, then I can think of no more gifted guide than Kening.
Farha Quadri, received second place in the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize for her delicious short story โOkra/bamya/lady fingersโ. She will be on a forthcoming episode of the Ceremony podcast this season; I canโt wait to share.
I wish you a week of ripe tomatoes, fairy brambles, and tart blackberries.
Love, LJ
this is microdosing ceremony, a letter from my artistโs cocoon to yours.
find out more about rituals and writing on the ceremony podcast.
explore creative rabbit holes on my website.
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