The other day I woke up early and lay in bed in a state of agitation. My mind did what minds are prone to do; it ran in tight little circles. Like your tongue does in the secret landscape of your mouth the night before a dentist’s appointment, my mind touched the hidden places, cavities of unfulfilled obligation, rough ridges of anticipated meetings, spongy folds of unknown terrors. Was it the business of the week ahead, with its series of hurdles stretching out like psychic fence posts before me? Could it be the bitter criticism of my opinions in the Inquirer newspaper? What about that unanswered telephone call from someone whose voice on the answer phone was too indistinct to catch? Or—oh, my God!—the bill I hadn’t yet paid?
And when I got up, I saw that the sky had fallen during the night. The shrubs in the garden were sagging wearily under the weight of last night’s deluge. There wasn’t enough light left in the world to read the addresses on the pile of post. One of my knees was up to its intermittent tricks, cracking ominously and making me limp. The grey of the winter was rattling its damp sabre at me, making me mortal again after the buoyant false immortality of summer. The message was unmistakable: Oh, hell, it’s September again.
In September you put on different clothes. It’s still too warm for the comforting camouflage of coats, but short sleeves are somehow silly and unfashionable. You don’t trust the weather. You peer at the sky as if it might betray you; it’s no time for basking. The winds that were welcome in the heat of August seem to have an ominous quality, as if they are blowing away the laughter and laziness of summer. There is a sense that everybody on the street is hurrying more, getting somewhere before the tune runs out in some archetypal game of musical chairs. What had been a seamless world, unified by the certainty of summer, has become a series of oases. You move from one to the other as briskly as you can; idling is for August.
The leaves have had the good grace to wait a while before turning. Once that happens you know you’ve got a real case of autumn to deal with. And the sun appears like an extra pudding after a meal, making you stop cautiously to catch the last healing rays on your face. It’s still light until seven or so. They haven’t yet pulled that cruel trick of backing up the clock and making it dark at teatime. But they will. Oh, they will.
In my autumnal mood I realise that I have some soul work to do. I have to stop opposing the change of season. After all, I can say lots of things about autumn that redeem it. It’s a time of new projects, of buying books and rulers and pencils. We never stop buying new school bags, really; we just get different ones. The shops are full of vegetables and fruits that come from around here, and not from Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv. You can eat a Brambly apple that came from Brimley and not from Johannesburg if you want. The light has become golden on its way to silver, like the light during an eclipse. The sun lowers and makes the shadows longer and more interesting. If we lived in the country we would smell burning leaves and the first wood fires, and that would trigger something fine in our human memories. Some say that it’s their favourite season. I know what they mean, though I can’t agree. No, I have to do some work on myself. I have to look at the clouds and the mist and give them permission to be there. I was painting a building once, years ago, in September. It was very expensive paint and I was proceeding slowly. About mid-afternoon, clouds formed, pregnant with North Carolina rain. I worked faster, with a growing sense of unease. I might be hurrying through a doomed project, but I didn’t know what else to do.
A man passed by. I recognised him as Hey Bob, a respected local builder before his arthritis got him. I hailed him—“Hey, Bob!”-- and began to explain my fears about the approaching rain. I explained that the pigment in the paint was specially formulated, but that it might run and streak if it got wet. Hey Bob listened carefully, nodding at each point. I was still halfway up the ladder, unable to decide what to do. At last he said,
“You know what I’d do if it was me?”
”No, tell me,” I said eagerly.
He smiled. “I’d let it rain.”
And of course he was right. It’s exhausting enough to scramble around on a stepladder with three gallons of special paint. Keeping back the rain is simply too much. So is holding on to summer.
II
Not so long ago I made a personal discovery. There is a sense in which today is my birthday. Not my actual calendar one—I was born in May. I mean in the sense that if you divide up a human life as if it were a calendar year, with everybody starting out on January 1st, then I would have got more or less to the fourth week in September more or less right now. I have used it several times as a kind of meditation. I recommend it. Take a moment right now and do your own calculations.
According to this story, the kids downstairs are somewhere in January or February. A lot is going on with them, mostly under the surface. Roots and stolons are creeping unnoticed through the invisible layers of the self, forming connections and anchoring them to the world. It is almost crocus time, that unexpected gift of the dark season, with their bright and optimistic colours. How they grow! How they surprise us with their relentless urge to manifest and display. Yesterday they were only small thoughts; today they are the first harbingers of immortality. And meanwhile they are asking, asking in every word and deed: who am I?
By the time you reach the end of March, say at the age of twenty, your life is really getting going. Buds are opening all over the place. Life is sexual, full of sap. Rough rains and brash winds whip around us. Things take on an almost cruel urgency. Anything is possible; everything is likely. You can’t contain April, it is too driven. You can only look upon it lovingly and wait.
When we get to June, our middle thirties, we are established. The sun cannot but nourish us, whether it rains or shines, whether it delivers its golden light or not. We are well rooted and confident. The summer stretches before us, if not infinite, then long—too long to count the days. We race upward; already we are a high as an elephant’s eye and nothing is going to stop us. Having sprouted with such vigour, we feel that limits are unlikely. Fortunately, we have reached the age when we know pretty much everything there is to know. Wasps sting but we don’t feel it. We have arrived through the uncertain days of spring and the unconsciousness of winter. We are alive; let’s do it!
By August we have lived through an infinite time of energy and growth. We have begun to slow down, but not because we must. We have done it because the summer has wrapped itself around us like a magical cloak. We are maturing; our colours are golden and we are heavy with fresh delectable fruit. There may be an occasional whisper, saying, “This is not forever,” but we can still turn our ears away and let the cicadas’ drone lull us a while longer. The forties have come and we have assumed out true shape. We are strong. We are intelligent. The whisper might persist: “But are we wise?”
September catches us by surprise. The bank holiday weekend comes and goes, and all at once we are fifty. The fruits of promise have become actual. Our heaviness in the morning is the heaviness of good harvest. And without realising it, we have begun to stack the sheaves, mill the corn, press the cider. The velvet smooth green of the pod has acquired spots and creases; only the pea within is youthful and appetising. The light that we felt would last forever tilts, leans, and we are aware of shadows, long ones that stretch beyond the limits of our seeing. The days pass, and now we try to catch them. Stay a while, summer. Just a little while longer.
Autumn finds us fat with riches, a harvest of family, a horde of stories to make our loved ones laugh and listen. But there have been so many happenings that we forget just a little. The comforts of the hearth appeal to us now. What was all that mad energy of the spring? Why did we believe everything was so important? Why were we always pregnant with unborn possibility? There is a kind of relief here in this state of post-harvest calm, and we enjoy it. But there is something else as well. Around us others have already succumbed, fallen like dry stalks. They lie visible to our eyes, but the time of snow to cover them is almost at hand. Have we made a true harvest? Is the missing cipher that will endow our days with meaning safely stored away from mould and moth? And if we find it, will we know?
As the days of autumn shrink and shorten, we feel the wind. It does not seem to be the brash gusts of April, when we were supple and could bend. Nor the cooling zephyrs of summer that ruffled us with sensual pleasure. The wind carries the cold. It reminds us of our first groping days in February, when we first asked, “Who am I?” But this time the answer is not for later, but for now. We rifle the stores of dream and memory, exhume vanished hopes. We set them on the mantle, which has become, at last, an altar. The snow is silent. It muffles the rude cries of the children, the optimistic answers of the young and the mellow tales of the mature. Hearing the silence is our work now. Permitting the snow and the dark is a high calling. When the words have lost their meaning, only that remains. And the question, “Is it enough?”
I am full of September reflections this year. This may be because I realise that I have to live in September for a while yet. Even at Christmas, even when the sun comes back to warm my shoulders in the Spring, even in the fabulous summer that I can’t wait to begin, I have to live here, in September.
What I need to know is in September, just as soon I will have to look at October, and hopefully, beyond. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is my time, and I must inhabit it as I have the twentieth century, without questioning. The part of me that is as old as the turning of the planet itself is making itself known to me in dreams and I find myself tripping over things again and again that remind me of this need. I don’t feel brave. I feel impelled, and the longing for summer is beginning to seem childish. I have arrived at September because that is where I belong. There must be someone or something I can thank for this, and if I can I will.
If you are In June or December, you can still visit me here in September. I’ll show you what I know of how to appreciate it. What you can do for me is help me remember June—Oh, June!—and gently reveal a little of the closing of the year, too. Wherever you are, I wish for you that you enjoy it. I don’t mean merely have fun—I mean deeply experience it, let it fill you with present awareness and a heaping storehouse of memory.
I’ll tell you something about this September, the one I live in now. Somewhere over the summer I have lost my convincing explanations and easy answers. I seem to have lost my bright ideas about God, too. But you know what? I don’t miss them. Where they pressed against my heart, they left a small wound. The wound has healed, or maybe it is that I have got used to the pain, I don’t know. What seems to be there now is an indulgent fondness for the youthful heat of my enquiry. I want to pat it on the head and say to my younger self, “There, there. Didn’t you always really know there are no answers? Didn’t you always really know it was going to be all right?”
Shucking the corn, shelling the peas. Throwing out what doesn’t matter. That’s what September can be, should be. That’s what we must do, isn’t it? That’s why we are here in our little months of life. That’s why God did it in the first place.
Rev.Art Lester 11th September 2005
Dublin Unitarian Church