My uncle Ken does not like autumn! In that you can be assured. He is open, honest and consistent in his personal feelings upon the matter. He likes the daffodils of spring: for him they mean winter is past, it is an ending and a sign of the beginning of (though always contingent in England) a glorious summer! I respect and hear him. For after all, many of my fellow countrymen think the same. They believe winter, apart from the religious and cultural splashes of Mid Winter and Christmas, is a cold wasteland of little value and largely devoid of the joys of nature. In England it is dark, cold, probably wet or frosted and frozen. Autumn is therefore a sign of that impending loss, an unwelcome guest: the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the year.
It is not that I do not empathise with this view. It is just that that is not what I experience. I love the Goddess just as well when she comes to my senses dressed in leaves of gold, yellow and brown as any season before. Even when, on the early morning of Winter Solstice, She who is cloaked in feathery Black flecked with dots of snowy white, my adoration is as fervent as before.
For the Yew Tree, The Holly and the various Pines remain vibrant and take the centre stage as companions as the Autumn puts on a glorious flourish and Her mystery play is enacted in ever more bright and yet sparse episodes as October chills and then blows it way across the stage with growing vigour.
Those trees teach that there is beauty of living green, even in Winter. Autumn is the beginning of a new play, not just the ending of a previous one. Winter also has her own important soliloquy.
I adore the Winter. Actually I adore each season in turn. I would not, all things being equal, live without one of them. You might say, they are in my blood. Part and parcel of that memory handed down to me from my ancestors. Not because I'm a freak of frosted icicles and snow covered roofs or the cold and wet and damp. I don't in fact always enjoy such….yet……they have their place!
Snowboarding and skiing with my sons on Christmas day in the Mountains of Bohemia, remains for me one of the most cherished occasions and memories of my life as a father, to date. Snowboarding something I really enjoyed, despite the spills!
Autumns Goddess followed by Winter is, for me, part and parcel of my life. I actually miss her when abroad in the Middle East for example. Why? Here there is not that change of season reflected quite so well in nature. It does also cool in Bahrain as I noted in my article on 16th September 2023 when I detected the first welcome cool breeze that split the stifling night heat. The birds do nest at this time from November and raise their chicks before the now rapidly approaching April heat begins to rise in leaps and bounds up the measuring red of a thermometer.
Spring Equinox, that I marked this year by painting eggs for my altar and ritual, comes without the dappled reflections of daffodil gold and yellow upon the green canvas of lawns and fields here in Bahrain. Yet here the air fronts engage in a symbolic battle for a week or two. The cold air forced north by the hot, dry air forming a near high pressure monopoly for the next six months or more. Yet the winter cool air leaves us with a precipitation and storm or two to remember it by.
I perhaps miss the regularity, the heartbeat that the Wheel of the Year gives to a child of those temperate Northern Hemispheres such as England. For the lessons of sparsity, of rest, of a deeper sleep and yes, even death: are those which autumn signals and winter teaches.
These are my human inheritance. They are important, perhaps even sought, by this strange mutant monkey of Albions shores. For they are unavoidable. I do not fear death. I see it as part and parcel of my life. If I am a spark of the Universe watching the Universe through human eyes for a time, I cant wait to shoot back to my brothers and sisters and tell them what we look like!
Still, as the painted eggs of Spring and Ostara show, those are just some of the lessons to be learnt. Spring, Beltane and Summer Solstice fill out and expand the mysteries of all life with tales of conception and birth and the thirst to live!
So as I am now consciously bidding adieu to Bahrains cool season and welcoming its hot one I am thinking of sap rising, budding leaves and stretching to turn light into energy. Of connection to the energies that pulse through creation.
And Jean puts sun block on my face.
The Wheel turns!
Blessings of the Ipil ipil tree (today’s cover picture) with it’s long and full seed pods, be yours!
Syre Byrd