Mabon

 

My mind is busy, I don’t know what to offer you. After those long days of August limbo life has exploded into gear, dates scribbled into the diary are becoming real. I have sort of started a new job, a day a week at the setting I have been working as bank staff for several years, providing one-to-one support to a child with additional needs. In a contrary way I am new and not new at the same time. September always means new children, new names and faces, new people to understand. But this year there are also online systems to grapple with, with a flock of new passwords and PINs. If a child plays in the woods and is not photographed, did it even happen? In addition this academic year I’m providing cover in another outside setting, a dreamy place, a Kindergarten that really is a garden. A setting created with such meticulous care and attention, it is exciting to be even a small part of such a place. Mondays I try to protect for writing, and also giving some time to a campaign to buy a community building in my neighbourhood.

There are new patterns for my nearly grown children too. My son has gone back to university, a new home, new housemates, and a new dodgy wifi connection, meaning our Saturday online check in was full of hitches and pauses. He reports a thriving ecosystem of insect life in the new accommodation, including many silverfish, but appears happy. For my daughter a new sixth form college, a big change from last year, exciting but overwhelming. A squirrel distracts me at this point, I am writing outside in the garden, it has cheeks bulging with peanuts in their shells, someone must leave them out. I come across these nuts constantly in my flower beds or dug into pots. The squirrels have been keen consumers of windfall apples too, I find tiny toothmarks.

Apples shift my mind back into thoughts of harvest, we are approaching the autumn equinox, a time when light and dark hang in perfect balance. If you need precision, the exact moment of equinox this year will be at 1.05am on Wednesday 23 September. I hope to be fast asleep at the time. In the pagan wheel of the year this is Mabon, a festival of harvest, a time to give thanks for things coming to fruition. Also a time of reflection, and preparation for the coming dark. I think of community rituals, the harvest festival we celebrated in primary school. In the coming weeks in school halls across the UK children will still sit cross-legged in front of an altar constructed from tinned peaches, later to be distributed to the deserving poor. Sometimes the vestiges of older customs will peek through, a fancy loaf baked in the shape of a wheatsheaf by a keen teacher or parent. Old goddesses of fertility, paired with their male counterparts flashing around their thunderbolts. Demeter showing her grief at the loss of her daughter Persephone and causing winter and scarcity. Songs we sang in those long ago school assemblies are just one of the many busy thoughts in my head: “Autumn days when the grass is jewelled/ And the silk inside a chestnut shell…” Although more confusingly the next line runs: “Jet planes waiting in the air to be refuelled…” Even as a child I suspected this was included to provide the rhyme and now as an adult married to an aero engineer I can report that planes just don’t work that way.

For me writing is reflection, a way of processing my thoughts, taking stock. So to finish, and in order to still my busy mind, calm my anxieties, I ask my brain to flip back through the last week for some September snapshots. Here is a small child lying back on a large outdoor beanbag and looking up into the shifting leaves of an oak tree dancing in the autumn sunshine, they sigh with satisfaction and catch my eye, we don’t speak but we both know this is one of the good bits. Here is a group of preschoolers rolling conkers riotously down a plastic track, the shiny brown fruits bounce and spring off in odd directions, playing with gravity. Here is a spider in her web on a cool damp morning wrapping a struggling tasty morsel. Here are fresh flowers in a mug on a low table surrounded by sturdy wooden stools, an invitation to sit and eat together, talking in circles and spirals. And finally, here are glorious front gardens, still blooming and showy, someone’s prize dahlias blazing pompoms of autumn tones, scarlet, russet, purple. This is all I have to offer you, I just hope that it is enough.

Photo shows the secret star that hides inside every apple, a little bit of everyday magic. I am listening to the audio book of The Axeman's Carnival by Catherine Chidgey, which is told from the perspective of a magpie. It's a bookgroup choice and I am really enjoying it. I'd like to find out more about New Zealand magpies, and I'm wondering what the UK version hanging out in my garden are busy chattering about. I also finished reading Talking to My Daughter by Yanis Varoufakis, which is an explanation of capitalism aimed at his teenage daughter.