Bridging the Seasons – Autumn to Winter

This is another piece Pen did recently for BBC Radio Scotland’s Out of Doors.

If you live immersed within a particular landscape, like I do here, I think it’s almost impossible not to be affected by changes in that landscape and, at this time of year, as we gently slide from one season into the next, I find the impact is really, quite profound. Physically, mentally, psychologically we’re on the move into Winter.

But what is it that signals our bodies and brains to brace for the months ahead?  Is it the first leaf that drops or the last?  Is it the changing smells, when the earthy, spice-ripe scents of Autumn suddenly soften or perhaps it’s that moment when your body first acknowledges the shift in the light, when night and day become ill-defined? 

I suspect the things which trigger the senses into knowing we’re moving from one season to the next must be different depending on who you are and where you live.  I rather like the idea of an individual ‘tipping point’ entirely determined by your own personal sense of place and how you connect to it.  All of our seasons moving at a slightly different time. 

This year I’ve had new signs of the seasonal shift.  We’ve started to keep bees and have watched their flights diminish, lessen and finally pause with the temperature drop. We planted an orchard at the start of the year and I’ve just taken the last apple from the young trees, still surprised that such small and fragile looking saplings could have produced fruit at all.

Up on the hillside the biggest tell is in the bracken.  Deer paths I’ve been unable to explore since the Spring are re-emerging.  There’s a sense of the landscape opening back up.    Walking by the River Ness this morning I was aware that I can see so much more, and my eye is drawn to small reveals, a tree coated in a hairy coat of lichen, that went un-noticed when it was in leaf.

In general, I love change - I even have a tattoo on my wrist a symbol for change, a reminder to embrace it, rather than fear it – and I do.  I love the transition from one season to the next, the sense of possibility each new section of the year brings, but my response to that shift from Autumn into Winter feels more complex.  While I welcome the change, it comes underpinned by grief which I don’t feel at other time of year.  Traditionally we talk of the end of the calendar year as a point of reflection but I’m not sure why, for me it’s now, this is when I pause and take stock.  Perhaps all those lost leaves of Autumn can’t help but remind us of what’s irretrievably now in the past, for good and bad. I find I want to draw Autumn out, make it last, so the sound of my feet walking through fallen leaves brings childish delight and a wash of nostalgia.

And I’m not alone, lots of poets, writers and songwriters have recognised the poignancy of this particular bridge of the seasons, often with more than a nod to melancholy.

For Shakespeare it was a metaphor for ageing

“When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see’st the twilight of such day”

And I find darkness too in poet, Mary Oliver’s Fall Song “another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves, the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows”

But while it’s not surprising the move from Autumn to Winter provides so much metaphor for loss and life passing, I don’t think we need see this time as necessarily sad.  Unlike the other seasons, you just have to work harder to reap the rewards of winter.  It’s often more subtle.  The light is milky and delicate; after Autumn’s vibrant oil painting, the hues of the landscape wash out to watercolour.

I’ve decided that this year, while I’m going to let myself pause and have a little grieve over the end of Autumn – because is it just so beautiful here in the Great Glen - I want to also consider what Winter might offer up as a lesson in life.  What wisdom is held in mulling over this transition to those darker shortened days?

And as I walk through the landscape it occurs to me that while Winter may signal an end, the Glen itself is not dying, it’s merely resting.  It’s putting its feet up after a year of constant toil and production.  Its conserving its energies, knowing that Spring and all its inevitable demands will surely follow.  I’m walking through a world that’s going to sleep – and the thought almost makes me want to whisper.

In contrast to this landscape, I don’t rest much.  I’m rubbish at it.  I’m constantly on the go but maybe the changes brought about by winter are telling me to make changes in my own landscape.  To allow my body to follow a more natural course of ‘inaction’.   We live in such a 24/7 society, so often disconnected from the rhythms of the seasons, that sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to stop.  I’ve forgotten that to stop is not just possible but essential.  I’ve forgotten how to Winter my own body. 

The more I think about it, the more this idea appeals.  Just like the landscape, if I rest, I can re-energise.  And if I stop rushing from one thing to the next, what else might I make room for, what possibilities do I want this Wintering my body to bring?   

So, I’ve now shifted and far from feeling loss over the end of Autumn and the end of another year, suddenly the thought of being about to courie down into an utterly self-indulgent 3 months of letting my body rest so my brain can read, think, reflect, write, cook, create or maybe just stare into the fire becomes not just desirable but necessary. 

And now I welcome Winter, nature’s gift, a gentle reminder to rest, recuperate and yes, reflect, before Spring…