Autumn – Your one wild and precious life

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?’

Mary Oliver asks and I wonder what the next years will hold as I step away from the news of political, economic and climate collapse.

We have passed the September pagan festival of Mabon which celebrates harvest and we are heading towards Samhain on the 31st October to 1st November. Samhain welcomes the dark part of the year in. It is a time thought to be a thin time where the world of spirits and ancestors are nearer.

When I was younger I used to dread the darkening months, but now I look forward to the drawing in of the light. I have allowed myself to attune to the change in seasons, turning inward from action to reflection, lighting fires, candles, sleeping, reading and settling into more stillness than the light of summer allows.

This afternoon I read and snoozed with the cat on my lap, in the middle of the day, alone in the house and I felt myself back in a time when I first bought this house, decades ago, when I lived here alone, and I can see that time approaching again and I saw the circle of empty, full to empty.

‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.

I do not know what else to do than feed the birds, stroke the cat, sit in the sharp still wintering sun with cold hands wrapping a warm bowl of soup embracing the space, which includes aloneness and loneliness and I make my peace with both and let them be.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Cut wood, store wood to make the house warm to live and eat and nestle. There doesn’t seem much more important a thing to have done than spent a day with dirt under my nails with my shoulders aching in gentle movement and conversation as we gather the abundance for winter’s store.

Autumn lets me pause, breathe, listen to the birds call into the dusk.

I see the circle of this home from single, pregnant, birthing, raising, leaving, single once more. It is what matters. I am not thinking about work, or promotions or money, but the people whose lives have joined with mine, for life, for a while or just a few times.

‘It passes quickly’ said my mum. She, who taught me to stop and stare, the feed the birds and talk to trees and watch the clouds.

I am cleared out, clearing out, emptying to let the dark and a new phase in, to see what will fall away to let more light in.

What will you do? How will you spend your days, your wild and precious moments of your finite days?
….
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver
The Summer Day

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Thank you to Stella Cronshey for your beautiful photo (2021)