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And we are all waiting
The dusk air is dead still. That silence where the leaves wait in absolute inertia, where the air is so thick you can feel yourself moving through it. Even the usual valley noises sound flat, deadened, muted. I am waiting. We are all waiting. The anticipation is almost oppressive. There is not even a hint of breeze. The branches of birch and willow hang dead weight in the fading light. There is a magick in the air that I can’t name, can’t define, but I can almost taste it.
I move slowly, lightly, tiptoe on the few fallen leaves that hint of autumn hiding just around the corner. I breathe quietly, eyes adjusting as darkness sweeps a blanket over the land. A bat flits silently above and I can almost see the trail it leaves in the air. I breathe the stillness deep into my lungs, the taste of night, damp, woody, dark, filling. The sweetness of summer tinged with the bark-notes of early autumn, tangy over my tongue. And still we wait.
I close the door, softly, softly. Inky blackness closes over the window panes, interspersed with familiar lights twinkling from the opposite valley side. Even inside, there is stillness. The fridge hums, low and constant. Outside, the air wraps itself around the stone walls, around flowers glowing in the darkness, around moths, around feathered night hunters perched in high branches, awaiting any small movement in the grasses below. We still. For what, I am unsure. But under my feet, deep in that place where knowing is absolute yet touch is impossible, I feel the silent arrival of something new. A new season, a fading of high summer, smudging together, passing a pin-point and tipping ever forwards. The dawn brings a new breath.
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Shrinking
My world is small these days. The long commutes and drives, the exploration, the excitement for new places and new things faded away, as over a decade or so an anxiety and dread grew stronger with every passing year. I’ve watched as long commutes were replaced by shorter journeys. Long wanders from the front door were replaced by driving to the wild moors, away from people. The contraction accelerated in recent years. Panic in familiar places. Dread of driving. Inability to go outside in the garden when neighbours were in theirs. An all-consuming anxiety. The grass grew long and I imprisoned myself, pacing, restless, missing the wild freedom I needed, sitting instead on the sofa in our dark stone house, relentlessly scrolling. Hoping to escape via a screen into a world that was just outside my window. I grew quiet. I grew numb. The last year, even the moorland faded from my reach. My car broken, anxiety too great to catch a bus. Cancelled and ignored plans. An invisible forcefield across the driveway gate that I just could not cross. After a long retreat of the tide, over all the years, I had finally reached a singularity. Stasis. Immoveable.
I fought and fought it but it still consumed me. Some deep, primal fear of perception, of judgement, a need for invisibility, a rage against all I used to do and just could not propel myself to do any more. I wanted to escape reality and scrolled incessantly. Screaming in silence, in under-stimulation, a prison of forced apathy for this neurodivergent brain.
But amongst it, finally, I started to find compassion. A small spark where I thought it would never end. Eventual beginnings of neurodivergent understanding took a while to land, initially numb, then growing, seismic pulses reaching back over the decades. I lay still and I felt them wash over me, colouring childhood memories with understanding, filling in blanks across these forty-plus years. A delayed grief for the death of my dad, layers upon layers of confusion, questions, slowly softened by the man who appears in my dreams, finally whole and here. The instability of the pandemic, the raw anger that still ricochets through us all, the pain, mass trauma, but business as usual. The ghostly imprint of a distant job that left me shell-shocked, with flashbacks, nightmares and avoidance that continue to this day, whilst huge chunks of that time are missing from memory. This body has felt it all. This body still feels it all. This body needed to still, and process, and hide away for a while. Perhaps this was its way. Perhaps this was needed. In stillness, I began to work through it all, relentlessly, fiercely and deeply supported by my husband, my only safe place, the person who helps me come back from it all, always. Contained in these four walls, a beginning, and an end.
So I continue my tiny, comfortable journeys – to university, to the shop, occasionally for a coffee in the neighbouring village. Familiar visits for holidays. Tiny movements. The moors wait, visible from where I sit in the garden, proud that I can hear a neighbours’ party and still sit outside, something I would have hidden from a few months ago. The difference now is that I know I will walk them again. The momentum is building, swelling, quietly but strong. This forty-second year is teaching me, and I am learning anew. A new understanding and trust that my world will expand again once more, in time. Tentatively feeling into my brain, into my soul, slowly discovering how to act on the things buried within. Enjoying bubbles of colour rising to the surface, long buried under layers of being countless versions of someone who was never actually myself. With this, the anxiety is receding. My soul, strengthening, not as afraid to be seen these days. The curiosity and hum of life pulling me back.
With my little broken car booked into a garage, I hope small wheels will soon carry me in return to those familiar places. Revisiting spirits of stream, grass and rock. Fingers tracing leaf fossils older than the land on which we walk. A slow re-immersion, a new season of exploration, following deer-trods and footprints once more. This anxiety, this shrinking has taught me much. How much I value the wild expanses and deserted moorlands. How much I need to feel wind on my skin, to breathe sharply in ice-cold water, to follow colours and move my body and drown in sounds. To explore this land, create familiarity once more. This house has held me, even when I felt the walls were closing in around me, and I look at it with new eyes. The jumbly, messy garden with its riot of life living here with us. The stone walls, once under oceans, permeable, providing shelter for us alongside a cacophony of other life existing on this little patch of land, in this minute sliver of time.
The deep knowledge that everything moves in cycles. My deep thaw is starting, even as the season turns to autumn here. Maybe this is my planting time, those few months before Samhain. New beginnings. New paths to tread. Slowly, I step outside the gate.
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Maybe it will all be ok
I feel as though my whole life was building up to this. Nothing special, nothing momentous. No news, no occasion. Just a hint of knowing, of acceptance, a beginning in this middle life.
I turned 42 this summer. A true mid-life age, but I feel everything else was a beginning, a prelude. Wild rides, highs and lows, not knowing who I am, swimming through decades. But it is here I am starting to come ashore. Two-score and two. That many years to begin to say, I am her, I like that, I am good at this. To expand into a body and soul more solid than it has ever felt before. To voice that which I didn’t dare before. To feel tentative joy in experience. To watch the glitter of that August-dry grass in the breeze and feel that same sway in the wind, the joy of movement, the embrace of my place in the web of it all.
My hair is falling out in clumps, probably hormones, probably the final year of the PhD, but with the shedding comes a thought of letting go, of leaving those memories locked in keratin and colour behind. Hanging from branches, pulled from hairbrushes, carried away in water flow. I keep a lock, pandemic hair, curled in a small basket, waiting for some magick to show itself, the time to be right to throw it to the wind or sea, or maybe stay with dark earth in silence. Tiny, silver-white hairs begin to regrow in place of long, red strands. I stare at them in amazement, wonder that I got this far, the emergence of a new chapter. Older me squeezes the hand of my younger self somewhere in another dimension of my mind, a few layers deep. She is healing, slowly, slowly. She is beginning to see the path. Neither of us know where we tread in coming years, but we get there, together.
That peach August sun picks out diamonds in the parched grasses surrounding the garden. The flags glow warm underfoot, skin sinking deliciously into the heat. The breeze tickles branches, glorious days. Rosehips glow red, blackberries shine that deep purple-black in the hedge. Harvest is early, this year, pushed by the heat of this dry, bright summer. These are my days, tiptoe-long and layered. Now I allow myself to stretch deep into the multi-layered love of the season, embracing the true depth of feeling for maybe the first time. Not just love for the long days, but each feeling is faceted, past and future, place and expansion, light and dark, what is and will be. Layers and layers, as always.
Two-score and two. The August exhale, the ripening of a harvest sown unknowingly all those years ago, fighting tooth and nail against storms, against identity, against myself. Now, as age spots and wrinkles begin to adorn my skin, I am beginning to understand. With each white hair, I feel love. With each darker spot on my hands, I smile. With new lines on my face, I gaze in wonder. It took a while to get here, but I wouldn’t change it. 42, but I feel I may begin to know myself for the first time ever. I am still discovering, settling, testing. But it feels different. In place of dread, a hint of a smile plays on my lips. Maybe it will all be ok.
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Wild winds
There’s an August storm whipping through the trees outside. Trunks bending, branches flailing wildly in the gales. The leaves are heavy, and the ground moves up and down with the gusts like waves. Plant pots tip and debris piles in corners. I leave it until the winds settle.
There are two small casualties of the storm, baby wood pigeons blown from the nest, sad little bodies in the rain, thin yellow feathers on cold skin. My heart hurts for them, and I carry them over the wall to a sheltered spot, scattering rose petals on their tiny wings. May they be used well, feeding new life, absorbed back into that interconnected web of which we all are part. A candle flickers for them now, as darkness falls. It is nature, and baby birds a precarious part of that, but we watched the parents pick twigs from our roof, spending time getting just the right ones, and I feel a wrench of sadness at the end of this nest for the year.
The wind is strong but warm, and runs through my hair like fingers when I turn my face to the gale. Usually I’d be up on the moors, running wild in the storm, but this year and the last I feel more of a pull to stay home. It is a quiet period for me, a conserving of energy, the slow times. It is what it is. Instead I read, and potter, and do some mundane household bits, whilst the rain batters the windows and the trees are shaped by wind-wraiths. There is a freshness to this wind, a clear smell, a cleansing. It wraps around the stone walls of the house, brushing away any lingering stagnancy, invigorating, clarifying. With our week away it seems all the cellar spiders in the world have moved in, and the house is expectant, cloying, waiting. It needs this movement, this autumn clean. I clean the inside, slowly, chaotically, opening windows to refresh stale air. The wind joins me, and together we revive these four stone walls.
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Lughnasadh, harvests and back to reality
We spent Lughnasadh week in Anglesey on our annual family holiday. The quiet, wild cove was now thrumming with people, the car park rammed, the watersports in full flow. Boats tacking across the bay, sails full, avoiding paddleboards and kite surfers. Cricket, sandcastles, coolboxes and camping chairs filled the sand. Land Rovers inching down the tight lane, meeting tractors on blind bends, figuring out logistics and passing places. Amongst this, we swam in freezing seas, trading jokes with those whizzing past, floating on the tide, gazing at the skies and fighter jets above, a small bubble amongst it all. Amongst all the noise and busyness, this place holds me. Something in my bones, in soul and cells. The ancient rock is solid beneath my feet, no matter the transience of life on the surface. The whip of wind through reeds, the cry of buzzards circling above, the quiet splosh as small waves tip over into breakers along the sand. The silence in between the noise. The settling into familiar days.
We visited standing stones and listened, the deep time pulse, the footsteps of thousands passing through. Exchanging smiles with those visiting for the same reasons, for a wisdom beyond us all, some feeling the pull to step through the doorway between, to whatever greets us on the other side. To let go, to start fresh, to weave time. On Lughnasadh eve, we stood in silence deep in Bryn Celli Ddu, as every year, hands on the stone and souls with those older than us. Earth in our lungs, roots from our feet, damp on our skin. The wheel inches ever forward.
And forward indeed, it has turned. We returned to brown, crispy teasels where just a week ago they were green, purple and full of bees. Leaves overtaken by powder mildew, the dry weather taking its toll. Brown edges creeping in with a sense of heaviness in the garden. A dullness, a long fatigue. Leaves pull down branches, apples ripening, blackberries glistening in the hedges. The red glow of haws, the deep black of sloes, the promise of a fruitfulness to gather and preserve for the long months on the horizon. I’m tired, at this time. The long exhale of summer is almost over. It is time to rest a little, before the harvest.
I wonder to myself what I am harvesting this year. Last year, I felt slowness, acceptance, seeds of understanding starting to ripen. This year, I feel it’s a second-year crop, building on those first tentative harvests, getting stronger, adapting. I haven’t tried to work on anything this year. I realised there is a constant push for ‘improvement’, or linear progress, like we should always be striving for something, striving to change ourselves, always working on a thing that shows that we are never quite enough, whatever that means. I finally stopped, and I’m just floating for a while, like in the salt water. I wanted to feel enough. I wanted to start to hear myself, for the first time. I didn’t know what I would learn, if anything, but I know earth is below, and sky is above, and it all holds me gently. I know wind brings whispers and water flows from source to sea, changing form, in multiple states. I know silence brings answers, tiny, quiet, but there, if we learn how to listen. So my harvest isn’t a field of corn, or a bushel of apples. It’s one or two plump blackberries, plucked from the hedgerow. A nut, brown and crunchy, ripening amongst others on hazel or walnut. A quiet harvest. A just-enough harvest. A forager’s harvest, not a farmer’s.
I’ve felt as though I’m waiting for something, but now I realise it isn’t quite that. Is waiting linear? To expand into non-linearity is something different, more of a curiosity, rather than the expectation of something coming to pull us ever forwards. Multiple layers, simultaneously forwards and backwards and left and right. There’s comfort in that, myself and my undefined blob of space-time, floating for now, circling in an eddy. Maybe soon, I’ll catch the river flow again, but for now, it’s enough. It’s a quiet time, and I realise now I need this to process, to catch up with myself, to let myself sift through the experiences of the last few weeks. I feel the need to be at home, tidying, doing easy tasks, with that processing going on in the background. Then it’ll be time again to dive in. Like the tide, ever changing but still continuous.
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Rise and fall
It is late July, but this morning there is the faintest tang of autumn on the breeze. Warm and humid, but the blackberries are plump and ripe, and grey clouds blanket the valley today. The bees are busily working their way through the teasel heads, scattering those slim purple petals like confetti into the pools of clear water collected in the leaves below.
The leaves are dusky, lush, faded green now, settling into the season, easy on the eyes. Summer feels slower, chilled out, breathing gently, luxuriating and comfortable. The heady rush of solstice is a distant memory, that tightly wound feeling and energy rush expended. I echo that slowing in recent days. A few long-term projects received their final intense push, completed, and now the out-breath. A time of heavy workload is somehow completed, words written, chapters closed off. New things raise their heads, vying to fill that new empty space, but somehow the urgency is gone and I feel I can take time in decisions, which is a new feeling for me. A new chapter of thinking, considering, and synthesis calls in my PhD work, mirroring the season. Lengthening time. Slow consideration. Time to digest. An active type of resting.
I find this helps with tough problems. Sometimes I get to the point where I feel I can’t push my brain any more. I’ve learnt over the last few years that stopping trying to actively think about a problem actually gives my brain the space to process it. Doing something different, taking away the focus, and letting my brain get on with it itself, with no conscious interference. Mostly, the answer will pop up by itself in a few days or weeks. I’ve been trying to leverage this, reading around, filling my brain with data, potential solutions, then taking the focus away and hoping the soup will simmer down to something clear. So far, it’s worked well – that trust and understanding in how my brain works is an ongoing curiosity. I know the answer will come, soon enough. I’ll ride the wave when it does.
For now, though, I settle into the languid season. My work slows but ticks over, attention to different aspects, brain filtering things in the background. I’m actually really enjoying my PhD right now, the whole writing up process, and I don’t want to set it down completely. I need to ride the momentum whilst it exists. As in all things, there are waves. Times of intensity, times of release, times of processing, times of building. The common advice of consistent, sustained effort doesn’t work for me, although it does for some. Routine, especially enforced routine, isn’t how my mind responds best. Or at all! But this flow, this seasonal rhythm, it carries me along with it with less resistance. A few pebbles in the stream, maybe, things that have to be done. But generally, listening to the rise and fall, it reminds me I’m held in the seasons. All part of the same, rush and rest, inhale and exhale, summer and winter. Everything is a cycle, even work, even thoughts. And we all breathe together.
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Pride, feelings and following bees
It’s been a hectic week. Now, here at the end of it, listening to the light patter of rain on the conservatory roof, I’m processing it all. That’s not to say it’s been a bad week. In fact, it’s been really enjoyable, just busy, and long, and a little overwhelming.I was always taught that pride comes before a fall. It’s weird how deeply those sayings can stick with us through life, negating any sense of achievement, instilling in us the belief that feeling good about things we’ve done is wrong, and we’d better be prepared for the ‘something bad’ that will inevitably follow. As part of this long journey of relearning, it’s affirming to feel pride in the things I’ve done. But at the same time, it’s also challenging, with a tinge of sadness and grief, too. But I’ve achieved some things this week so I’m tentatively expanding into that feeling of accomplishment, and starting to learn to let go of the underlying feeling of dread that it will all go wrong soon. It’s not bad to feel proud, and slowly, I allow myself a little smile of happiness, a little warmth kindled inside my soul.
The dry weather and flowering teasels have brought all sorts of wildlife into the garden for a drink of nectar. Voles rustle in the undergrowth, whilst huge butterflies and a rambling assortment of bees buzz happily between those spiky teasel heads, putting their long tongues into the flowers and getting confused when another bee wants to drink from the same place. I love them. I’ve spent hours just sitting in the sun, watching, feeling my heart soar and sharing the space with the beating thrum of life at the summer peak.
It’s a joy that is limitless. Watching a new butterfly flit into the garden, seeing a frog pop its head up from the depths of the pond, getting buzzed by bats at dusk. It’s hard to explain but my soul truly lifts in those moments. The feeling is intoxicating, the feeling of life, of some energy beating through the land, of the full tide of living, breathing, just existing swelling all around. I’m re-learning that it’s ok to lose myself in that overwhelming, full colour, neurodivergent soup of feeling and thoughts and swirling experience. There’s no ‘should‘ or ‘don’t‘ or ‘”stop saying wow!“‘. Some part of me is crumbling and softening, a little, and I am wide-eyed and wonderous at it all. I flung open the conservatory doors earlier and breathed in the petrichor of the grey morning, in a moment that was almost euphoric. Time and colour and smell and joy, just bursting in that one breath, rising from my feet to the top of my head and out, out into the universe. The prickles on my skin where raindrops patter on the rooftop, almost tickling, shivering through my veins. The shine of a leaf that brings glitter to my soul. Following bees around the garden, stopping where they stop, watching them feed and buzz and bumble and fuzz. A line of ants, triggering memories of sunny holidays, following them to a crack in the ground, intently focused.
It’s an overwhelming process, this letting go. I’ve heard of it as unmasking and I get that description, but I feel it’s something bigger, the understanding. That little jolt where it all makes sense, and the enormity of the road ahead. But in this there is joy, and peace, and the freedom now to follow the endless curiosity that didn’t have a voice before. There is pride, and a fierceness, and wonder at the depth of it all.
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Wild gardens and holding space
The garden holds me. It runs wild this year, fuelled by curiosity and if I’m honest, a little weariness with the pressure of upkeep. Teasels have made a jungle in the veg patch, and a multitude of grasses sway and ripple in the heat. The wildness is intoxicating, though. Insects flit through, pausing to fill up on nectar. A gaggle of ladybirds pupated in their masses on the back wall and are currently finding new homes amongst the undergrowth. Rare hoverfly larvae made short work of the fir aphids that appeared, then decided to pupate under the stone slabs. I have never seen so many butterflies. And in those times where my brain is full, I sit here, as I do now, under a parasol or shaded by the gangly climbing rose, and just watch and exist alongside this riot of life.
At night, I come and wonder and gaze at stars, swooped low by bats, occasionally bumped in to by a huge, chunky moth, or catching the glimmer of ghost white wings in hedgerows. Our first poplar hawk moth arrived this year. Frogs rustle and plop in the darkness. The badger trundles through now and then. This little patch of earth, for this infinitesimally small time, shared by all the things that call it home. In that there is comfort.
Today, I’m feeling some sort of existential dread, and here I sit, rippling out waves of anxiety, and bit by bit, the garden softens me, transmutes those waves into something more gentle. It wraps itself around me, holding space, reminding me that we are all the same, and that deadlines, papers and chapters and the general rush of the final PhD year can be put aside for a moment. I watch the breeze rippling across the long, heat-faded grass, a cricket fizzing and rasping, somewhere beneath the stems.
Sometimes, of course, the anxiety hangs around. I try to accept, to flow with those tides, hormones and cycles, months and phases. And of course, try is the word. I don’t always succeed, but I try again, and again, and embrace the curiosity of it all, which in itself is freeing. I think letting go of the garden has helped, in some strange way. Leaving the grass to grow wild. Leaving the veg patch to be taken over by whatever decides to seed itself there. Watching ragwort grow through paving, and holly leaves falling into piles. The garden breathes out, free from pressure. And in that, it is thriving. Seeing the breadth of life that has decided to make it’s home next to ours, amongst this wildness and chaos, it’s taught me something. Something unformed, yet still powerful. To let go of so much control. To tread gentle paths through wildness. To sit and observe and trust that we know, somewhere deep down. We just have to create the space to listen.
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Breathing Out
Solstice has come and gone, with that heady rush and energy that build and builds in the days beforehand. The stillness, the dusk and light and dusk and light of that peak pause, where breath is held, eyes wide, hands stretched out into the infinite space that seems to surround us at midsummer. A light that never turns to night. A feeling of endless possibility. Sometimes it feels too much, even. But wonderful, wonderful.
Now, a few weeks later, that tightness is loosening. That breath held cooped up in lungs that felt too small at the time is exhaled. We soften, slow a little, and relax into the colours of summer proper. The leaves lose their shine and become more matte, more muted. Grass and crops turn yellow gold. The insects living alongside us buzz busily into the dusk.
I’ve had a break from writing, to concentrate on finishing my PhD, to head my health in a better direction, and to just process the last few years. It’s been beneficial to step back from here for a while, leaving the cobwebs to gather and words to settle and fade. But in all things, as always, the tide ebbs and flows. I feel the pull back here once more. In the slow times over winter, I had time to think. To stop pushing and rushing.
So, I extended my studies by a year to give myself time to breathe. In creating space by stepping back from here, I filled that gap with more busy-ness that now, in this pause-time, I realise wasn’t for me at all. So, once more we begin. I call for endless learning, the embracing of curiosity, and the inspiration of the seasons. It’s ok to wander, to try, to hold close and let go. Seasons fill with energy, then change. It all repeats. Things come and go, and it’s all ok. As summer stretches out, languid and light, I hear its call. Wander on, to that midnight light on the horizon and the stretching of the dawn.
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Winter, Hibernation and Answers in the Dark
Winter, Hibernation and Answers in the Dark
As the days darken and the leaves fall slowly to the ground, we slow. As those crisp autumn colours mute and fade to that deep brown, tinged with those sparkling diamonds of frost, it is time to settle. As deadlines ramp up before the winter holidays, as shops open longer and fill themselves with bright colours, listen to that quiet pull in the opposite direction. To sit on freezing ground, to breathe in thin, sharp air, and feel the insistent tug towards the dark. Peeling layers away, finding truth hiding in that instinctual part of ourselves, that quiet tide of back and forth, back and forth that roots us with a strength beyond knowledge. To walk the way of the old ones. To let go and wait for the warmth to return, in months ahead, with the deep knowledge that it will, as always. The circle in all. So for now, we still.
The darkness is the beginning and the end. For now, listen and slow and gather the last. The space and silence to review, to bury seeds deep in loam, to breathe out and let go and trust in the future of those small shoots. Be as the trees, letting leaves fall to nourish new growth in spring.
I make tincture from berries gathered in autumn, to see through the darker months. I leave jars of water out in moonlight, and dance in the falling Birch seeds that carpet the ground like snowfall, revelling in the quiet pitter patter as they drop from drooping branches, as my friend Birch settles into winter, too, silver bark echoing the moonlight illuminating the valley. I slow and sleep and settle. It has not always been easy, fighting the unrelenting consumer season, the workload, the part of me that wants to exist solely in the highs of summer. But there are answers in the dark, and to hear them, I must follow those old footprints across frozen moorland, deep into earthy forests where secrets are whispered on the freezing winds.
As the last leaves fall from the trees we live alongside, I know a few things I need to lay down alongside them. To let myself breathe. To loosen the grip on relentless pursuit, and listen instead. To watch, and ask, and hear the answers. To let things just be, to follow curiosity, to accept. And so, I lay these things in the falling leaves, to rot, to transform, to bring nourishment in future times.
So for now, the blog silences as I work on finishing my PhD. To hide and hibernate as a seed in the loam, to return when my brain has capacity. I bury this space, this potential, and wait. Soon, it will grow again. A leaf, to earth, to roots, to those small buds of spring. The wheel will turn.