Dear Readers and Writers,
As I write this, the Fall Equinox approaches, and with it the very welcome cool winds and bright colors and clear starry nights of autumn. The Fall Equinox arrives in the Northern Hemisphere on September 22 at 11:19 AM Pacific time this year. Harvest time.
My wife Leslie and I met in 1970. We’ve lived together since 1973, sharing many gardens and attunements to the natural world. We think along the same green lines!
The nature spirits in our gardens have beckoned back to us. One day in 1997, I attune to the garden space as mixed greens come up. Sitting in a quiet room with good view of the garden all at once my vantage point is underneath the greens, which tower over me! I can feel the friendly unseen presences of Nature entities around me. I get a “Welcome to our world” kind of feeling.
As much as possible, we grow our own food and buy locally grown vegetables from our farmer’s market and food co-op. This is grounded grassroots activism–the kind that strengthens healthy local circular economy and community. Eating a quality organic diet can help us embody more of Nature’s living power making it easier to cope with our chemically toxic environment and resonate with Nature.
*
As we approach the equinox, I’ll share a poem by Wendell Berry about the time a little before its arrival. I can’t say enough good things about Berry’s work— his novels, short stories, essays on agriculture and society and his decades of dedicated farming on his ancestral hillside farm in Henry County, Kentucky. Let’s join him there, via his poem…
SEPTEMBER 2, 1969
In the evening there were flocks of nighthawks
passing southward over the valley. The tall
sunflowers stood, burning on their stalks
to cold seed, by the still river. And high
up the birds rose into sight against the darkening
clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
And in my mind, where had stood a garden
straining to the light, there grew
an acceptance of decline. Having worked,
I would sleep, my leaves all dissolved in flight.
Turning now to the coming season, here’s a haiku-like piece I wrote in celebration of autumn leaves and winds. The last stanza touches on my sense of the lingering spirits of departed country persons:
OZARK GOLD SCROLL
The Box Turtle
containing all winds
releases all winds.
Trees sway,
shed shoals of leaves
that sink and swim.
Gold tallow leaves,
vermilion eaves,
red caves all laid low.
The absent stand
in rusted woods
in autumn’s cider glow
I’m moved to follow that little piece of mine with the first few stanzas of a very long Wendell Berry poem which brings the themes of autumn and death and time and spirit together in a most subtle, remarkable way. I believe this poem simply, objectively reports the poet’s actual experience. You can find it in its entirety in his book The Wheel (1982) and in Wendell Berry New Collected Poems (2012):
ELEGY
1.
To be at home on its native ground
the mind must go down below its horizon,
descend below the lightfall
on ridge and steep and valley floor
to receive the lives of the dead. It must wake
in their sleep, who wake in its dreams.
“Who is here?” On the rock road between
creek and woods in the fall of the year,
I stood and listened. I heard the cries
of little birds high in the wind.
And then the beat of old footsteps
came around me and my sight was changed.
I passed through the lens of darkness
as through a furrow, and the dead
gathered to meet me. They knew me,
but looked in wonder at the lines in my face,
the white hairs sprinkled on my head.
I saw a tall old man leaning
upon a cane, his open hand
raised in some fierce commendation,
knowledge of long labor in his eyes;
another, a gentler countenance,
smiling beneath a brim of sweaty felt
to welcome me as before.
I saw an old woman, a saver
of little things, whose lonely grief
was the first I knew; and one bent
with age and pain, whose busy hands
worked out a selflessness of love.
Those were my teachers. And there were more,
beloved of face and name, who once bore
the substance of our common ground.
Their eyes, having grieved all grief, were clear.
Wendell Berry’s poem continues for 6 more increasingly amazing pages, drawing one ever deeper into his visionary communion with the dead there in the autumn woods in Kentucky, in eternity.
*
Now turning again, from the death side to the life side of the autumn season, I wrote this little poem about the pleasures of harvesting what we’ve grown from our autumn garden:
OZARK HARVEST
1.
Lay seed in thumbnail deep
at first spring sunning,
when rays stir in bed
of roots’ long slumber.
Along summer’s green path
gold days scatter–
air decked in light
gray rain and thunder.
Before frost filigrees,
as sun dries dew,
harvest and savor
your share.
2.
Hang herbs leaf-down,
drying in fragrant clumps.
Lug in the fat sweet potato
sacks; torn tomatoes seeping seed.
Shake down ripe jocular apples;
squat and palm wild persimmons
erupting their amber.
Pick those plump blue
muscadine that bubble up on the vine.
Now, bring the garden indoors
to inhale and heal
in your kitchen of Winter Lull.
The great gardener, horticulturalist, and botanist Luther Burbank (1849-1926) developed more than eight hundred new varieties of plants. Acutely observing and loving Nature, Burbank integrated a highly developed intuition with scientific experimentation. In the following passage from a lecture, he describes his own way of attunement to nature:
In pursuing the study of any of the universal and ever-lasting laws of nature, whether relating
to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the
psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can
become one of nature’s interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world.
Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen
patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach,
shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She
conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as
suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At
last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a
universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.
*
I wrote this poem for Leslie one autumn day to celebrate our life together and the Ozark bioregion we live in:
AUTUMN’S TURQUOISE MIRROR
When you came to live with me
many gardens ago
in the cabin by the lake
we began to watch waters
and sky slide by together
in autumn’s turquoise mirror,
and the heavens charged with rain.
My love, your hair infused
with the sun of passing summers,
is sun-drowned like those zinnias
that have taken over
the east garden.
Now the secret inscriptions of things
gradually appear to us– written openly
in water and cloud, palm and eye,
feather and breath. The white star
flakes fall all night. The oak are there
all night to catch them.
We are warm together under
our star-patterned portion of the quilt
of towns and breathing fields.
Here in our bed of seasons is
love.
*
The late Dorothy Maclean, my friend and co-founder of the Findhorn Garden, wrote:
“When you’re in tune with inner joyousness, there is no such thing as
coincidence or being in the wrong place. What has been most mundane is
transformed and sparkles. When you know this approach miracles begin to
happen around you here and there and everywhere.”
As a possible, optional prompt, consider writing about the joys of autumn.
Joy is key in the midst of the sorrow and suffering of the present situation.
Keeping our heads and hearts above those troubled waters, we may feel the joy at the core of Creation and meet the extraordinary challenges of this transitional moment in our human journey with greater intelligence and energy.
This autumn season, please touch the Earth with love,
Geoff Oelsner