They call it creative writing, but I’m sure that what I do is not that. I think of it more as responsive writing, reflective writing, capturing what is, rather than actually creating anything. I suspect I’ve never had a truly original thought in my entire life, but somehow that doesn’t make it any less of a need in me to share the thoughts I have.
Unoriginality might be another word for universality. Maybe the less original the way of thinking, the more meaning it might carry out into the world. That’s my excuse, anyway.
There are days – by which I mean days and nights and weeks – when I feel that I have nothing left to say. Then something reminds me that I never set out to say anything in the first place.
No, that’s not true. In the first place I did – in the first place, I wanted to start a conversation that might have changed a whole way of working – but that was in another life, and I failed. No-one was interested in having the conversation. Complaining about how things were was always easier than discussing how we could make them different.
I gave up that life, for this one. This one where I can say what’s on my mind and heart, regardless of whether it carries meaning or not, because there is no actual point to it. I am not trying to say something, leastways not something important. I am not trying to achieve anything. I am no longer trying to change the world. I am simply singing the world as I see it…and trying very hard to see it beautiful and wise and worth caring about and caring for.
And the only reason for doing so, is that it pleases me to do so.
It pleases me and soothes me and heals the parts of me that sometimes ache for the knowing of what else is happening out there, out beyond the boundaries I have set for myself.
I know there is another world…a world of pointless brutality and cruelty and treachery and hatred and bombs falling and children starving and poverty and people being considered ‘less’ because of one facet of who they were born to be and power-crazed greedy individuals who are, at base, possibly no more selfish than I am in choosing my life boundaried against that world.
I cannot carry the weight of that world. So I put it aside. You can call that cowardice, or selfishness, and I won’t argue the point. I call it self-preservation – which in the end might be the same thing.
These are the kinds of thoughts that Autumn brings.
Autumn is the beginning of the ending of things. The dying of things. The coming of Winter. But maybe, only because we’ve been accustomed to thinking this way.
We’ve become accustomed to thinking of the dying of things as the ending of things…what if we didn’t? What if we simply saw it as the changing of things? One thing into another.
A few weeks ago, cutting back through the cemetery as I often do, I stopped in shock. One of ‘my’ trees, one of my beloved silver birches had been brutally felled. Sawn through at my waist-height, a flat table created for squirrels but a harsh ending for a graceful lady. Her remains had been cleared. Rains had washed away the sawdust. Only this stark truncated trunk remained. It showed no signs of rot or root-loosening or any other reason for her felling.
But maybe there was one. Maybe those who cut her down spoke soothingly to her as they did so.
I wondered if I would miss her less, if I did not have to walk past that waist-high memorial, standing like some fallen column in a Roman forum, a ruin on an Ephesus street. Her mottled silver bark so like crumbling stone.
Then Summer turned through Autumn and I think I began to understand. Around her, huge beds of fungal fruits are emerging, great chestnut-coloured quilts, that glow in low sunlight and eventually collapse in tobacco dark shreds in the rain. I imagine her having sent her dying breaths down into her roots, an Abandon Ship! message to her co-conspirators of that one joined life.
I imagine the last of her force being drawn down into the earth by those strange fungal entities, gorging themselves on essence of birch, in order that they can send up such a fruiting, a whole flotilla of escape pods, out from the dark space of earth into the light, to launch an armada of spores into the air.
If they are birch specialists some of them will survive. My lady had companions. Some of those spores will fall to earth close to where they were born, and hopefully, deep below ground will find the new gestating home they need.
This morning I sat in the quiet of my room. The only sounds were the clock ticking, the pen brushing the page. My eyes were drawn – again and again and again – to the beech tree over the road. In the light of this morning, it shone all the caramel colours of fairground apples dipped in toffee, and bathed by slant lights. The beauty of a moment casting back to other beautiful things. Now and then.
I remember mourning for this tree too, a few years ago, when they hacked all his ancient limbs back, but left him standing. I remember how for a summer or two he could no longer dance in spring breezes, shaking new leaves in joy. And yet here he is again, strong and vibrant. Fully leafed again this year, standing up to all that’s thrown his way.
In his glory now, his Autumn cloak. Bronze. Copper. Shield and coins. A bountiful warrior. A smiling, look-at-me-and-do-likewise call to arms, to change, to survival, to bearing the brunt and carrying on.
His gilding came on quickly this year. In a matter of days. Sometimes that is how it is with change. We think maybe this time it will be different, because it has not happened as we thought it would…but it will come. Change is but another word for time. And time is but another word for life.
Today I walked among the graves, as I often do. Not because I’m morbid, but because they are close at hand, and nature thrives where men and women do not. My feet have whispered conversations with the fallen leaves. The gist of it, I gather, is that in no time at all, none of it will matter. We too will be the year’s fallen leaves, still golden bright, but fading, disintegrating. And then we will be last year’s leaves. Who remembers them?
Who cares now for that one specific oak leaf, with its last few chlorophyl-full cells? Who remembers the bright red maple leaf they picked up when they were six years old? Remember when we brought them home and sellotaped them into scrap books, and our parents didn’t tell us we would one day throw them all away. All those bright-leaf-lives could not be held.
Nor can ours.
But somehow, it doesn’t matter, that the scrap books were scrapped. What matters are the conversations our childish feet had with the fallen leaves of those years, and that we thought them beautiful enough to want to keep.
It is not the keeping of the beauty; it is the noticing of it in the first place. Not the holding, but the knowing it is worth trying to keep hold.
Today I walked down the lane. Slowly. Seeking out the Autumn flowers and the berries and the wayward trees who insist on having both on adjacent boughs.
I looked at seed keys against the deep blue of the sky.
Bright white flowers in the undergrowth, that I cannot name.
The cyclamen flowered early and have retreated.
The holly and ivy are staking their claims.
The robin still sings.
And I listen to a Sunday quiet, an Autumn stillness. I hear the absence of cars and screaming jets. I hear my own footsteps through the leaves. A squirrel pauses to look at me, and then scrambles over the railings, his mouth too full of acorn to say anything.
Maybe that’s why I feel I have nothing much to say. Perhaps my cheeks are too full of acorns, that I’m squirrelling away to get me through the Winter.
Or perhaps I'm wondering about the seeds not yet flown, and the blueness of the sky.
