September. I love September and its mellow, hallowed sun. I love its peace, its fruitfulness, its completeness, and its smiling willingness to forget itself and yield to autumn. This year there are no plums on my tree and few apples but it isn’t worried. There are seeds aplenty storing the bowels of this summer for the future. It is still green, a lazy mantle of life covering the land, filling and filled by the air. There are still roses, there is still warmth, there is always welcome.
The conversation of rain
The rain comes in bursts like a conversation, all day it is either wet or waiting in the wings. Right now it is so heavy you can hear it playing its own drums with crescendos and diminuendos to keep you listening. It is outside my window under the grey sky. It is out, I am in, it is loud, I am quiet, it is cold, I am warm, it is wet, I am dry. The rain is beyond me
but today it is defining me.
Quiet
It is quiet in the study, reflecting the quietness in the house. The muffled sounds of passing cars are a wrapper for the silence. Outside the rain is falling. Inside it is warm like the inside of a body. Warm and still. I can let the stillness fill me, it is weighty like glory, like the presence of God. I can feel its tremor, its quickening, its life.
The thing about spring
The thing about spring is it keeps you on your toes. It shakes you awake each morning with a bracing chill unlike the languid heat of summer, or the cosy hearth-warmth of winter. The sky is promising sun and blue and the air is quickening and moving and ready and the leaves are growing and the fern fronds are pushing and uncurling and the birds are all a twitter and the air is bracing. Through the day you can walk through warm pools of indulgence chased by cool winds of purpose. The clouds play the same game, chasing patterns of change across the sky. It is cold, it is hot, it is sharply, freshly wet, it is suddenly dry, it is teasing and moving and exploring and growing and full of the energy of life. Here comes a shower when I started in sunshine, and who can predict the changes that will cavort today?
There’s always more to do in spring, tending newly-grown gardens and removing dead wood and leaves and daffodil heads, spring cleaning houses and thoughts and ways of being and erupting onto the new stage that spring brings. Change is unharnessing the old and trying on the new, and finding as we do so that we are young again. Although the sun and clouds play chase and you can never tell which one you will find in the sky, the sun is winning as the days grow in warmth and light and abundance. And we are dancing, we are shedding winter coats of heart and treading greyness of thought into an early grave. We are whipped by the wind like the leaves on the birch tree until we find ourselves bare and ready to move or linger, dancing with the pulse of this time.
The obligations of the day
The sun is singing, singing over my head and over the clenched heads of morning-drenched daisies and the few glistening drops of rain that still huddle in the grass. The week has been windy and cool and I have shut down from the summer and retreated into internal affairs. But today as I walk distractedly down the garden the sun is calling, calling over my head and welcoming me back into favour. I am carrying the obligations of the day, folded in on them like a fist which is now opening and dropping, opening and dropping like a petal. I have things to do but I have lost my rush and bother, and the hours ahead have stopped moving so fast, have stopped clamping the edge and sucking time into a tight box. There are roses here to notice, sprays of yellow-flushed white adorning the hawthorn, and the lavatera is opening, pink-veined cups with sceptres at their centre.
I will take my troubles and lay them down, I will breathe in and hold the peace of the day, then pour out my pressures into the patient air. I will plant roses in my belly to perfume and still my dark, moving centre. I will listen to the babble of voices there like a friendly aunt, listen and hold their fretting until they feel safe to stop. And I will invite the steady sweep of the spirit of God that is singing, singing over my head to fill and enfold my inside and outside world.