Autumn muse, seasonal musings and a little magick…

There’s been a pause for me… everything slowed and yet internally I’ve been moving fast… my mind racing to find answers to the craziness we’re witnessing. But, then I stop and look around me… at the beauty of this world despite the cruelty of human behaviour and wonder if so many lost their way, lost their natural rhythm or just hadn’t found it.

I realised I have and that in truth I never lost it. From childhood running wild amongst the trees. Exploring natural nooks and crevices in their knobbly bark while my mouth, and fingers became purpled with wild blackberry stain… that same stain I brew for ink.

A trip to the coast, where at low tide, tiny crabs and other crustaceans could be seen in rook pools or half buried in tidal foam rims of kelp and other flotsam and jetsam.

Today, in my seventies, that child is alive and well. Although I may not clamber down a rocky shoreline or even race around the orchard at the farm that was my home in West Sussex, so long ago, she lives behind my eyes, in my seeking hands and in my mind that will never tire of witnessing the wonder nature lays out before me. A different farm may hold me now… Australian energy is very different to the Isle where I was born and where I grew to adulthood before launching myself into the world, but somehow the link between is clearly marked by the parallels in the landscape now, after years of merging the Australian with the Isle of Britain. Perhaps, in so doing, I have instigated an energy exchange… a portal or a tunnel if you will, that creates a liminal space to allow the myths and legends of both tiny island and vast continent to merge via the energy exchange of trees, fungi, native and non native flora and fauna.

Autumn for me is the season of the muse… she arrives in the crunch of dry leaves underfoot and the soft earthy scents of moss and mud. In the woods, spirits stir, stretching rustly leaf-wings… Samhain approaches and the veil thins, letting creatures come and go unhindered through the corridors of time.

The nature of this world is change. Seasons change and the year moves through its natural cycles. When the very nature of humankind shifts us from one cycle into another of violence and death, starvation, homelessness and fear, all in the need for political/financial gain… life, aka nature, simply keeps going.

Her cycles change and adapt, but she doesn’t need us… so yes, she moves from spring into summer, into autumn and winter, seamlessly. A tree falls… other organisms thrive on the remains and nothing is wasted. Flowers bloom, fade, become berries or apples and are devoured by whatever predator gets there first and we are one of them… we are predators, our instincts to survive pushing us to live, to breath, to have, to create and to destroy and all is mirrored in nature except… we want it all and if not freely given, we take and take and take to build our little empires that too, will eventually fall into obsolescence.

Just as leaves fall and seeds are blown on the wind, (or perhaps, make a journey through the alimentary canal of bird or beast) we shed skin follicles, hair, droplets of fluid from sweat, tears, spittle… not to mention other bodily functions, solids and fluids. These particles that bear our ‘Sigil,’ our unique signature of who we are, are constantly and eternally drifting out into the universe to share themselves (aka explains themselves) to anything else they come into contact with. I am sure you’ve all heard the phrase ‘we are made of the stuff of the stars,’ …well of course we are!

A tree in the forest communicates with everything around it in the same manner, in order for creatures to understand its signature as ‘eat me’ or ‘eat me at your peril.’ It’s only humans who are stupid enough to forget the signatures of the forests; the signatures of the elements in weather patterns through cupped leaves, bird and animal behaviour or simply by that feeling in the belly that something is about to shift.

The communication of that same tree is no different to our sigil of skin, hair, spittle etc., it loses leaves, seed pods and seeds go into the ground. Dust from its bark and the bark itself, falls to become particles that fly off to join with others to create something else entirely. Eventually the whole tree will rot and fall… does it question that? It’s really only us that say, ‘oh no you can’t dispose of my body like that. You can’t let it rot where it is like all the other creatures of the forest, including trees and all plant/animal life!

Yes, naturally, ceremony for our dead is important, honouring our ancestors too, but how the body disperses into those particles in the Dance of Life is probably the moot point and the mystery. It is our ‘reaction versus response’ that has made us the way we are towards life and death itself. We are I feel, even more sensitive right now to these rituals of honouring due to the way we see the world shaping up; descending into war, famine and fear. Random, tragic events are also more evident every day through the news and social media.

We mourn, we grieve but nature simply moves on… cycles change, seasons change and it is there… right there in nature, we come to terms with mortality, fragility, fear and pain by its mirror of ourselves but completely without judgement. She teaches us to feel it all, to surrender to it all and find the peace of simply being…

I decided to begin Wild Spirit Whispers (now that the the layout and ideas are more firmly strung together, rather than rattling around like wooden beads on a thread), with the season of autumn as she wanders through my psyche, trailing long sleeves of frost and dew, through the icy portal towards winter.

She’s such a delicate entity, made of pure reason and yet prone to throw off the season’s delicately coloured skeins and stride along in white and silver moon-struck lace, just to catch one unawares… sprinting ahead with random ideas, thoughts and dreams of a final completion to another year and the beginning of another book… my tenth.

Yet, in this season of withdrawal, when leaves fall, let loose by the retreat of sap and energy, we too may go within and seek out the next phase of our being. Just as I attempt to do same… there she is, entering my dreams with odd sounds and symbols. Clattering around like a cook in a kitchen who can’t find the right implements to create a feast, all in my sleeping psyche.

At first she leaves only remnants for story, prose, art or poetry but then in she comes with the rubber mallet, leaving larger deposits of data for my battered brain to work through and it’s precisely at this moment it’s time to retreat to the studio… no matter the given hour, to write or paint until she leaves me to my slumbers…

As this inner dialogue progresses, amounts of information are downloaded in huge juicy bites (sometimes, sound-bites) then it’s left to me to conjure it into some sort of order, understandable for mortal ingestion.

When spirit speaks
in muffled tones
and autumn drifts
into wintry zones
you can feel the calling
in your very bones
…speaking the rhythm of nature
When mind clouds gather
and winter winds roar
the muse enters
through a forgotten door
taking your mind to leap and soar
…singing the rhythm of nature
When the mind is free
to wandering
allowing the time
for pondering
a landscape appears
beyond all mortal fears
…whispering the rhythm of nature
When mankind’s actions
threaten extinction
storms create fractiles
of pulsing division
Earth rumbles and shakes
volcano spume
deep earth quakes
…roaring the rhythm of nature
When oak presents its tiny flowers
and birch shines silver
in sweet rain showers
red tipped leaves glow
in sacred bowers
do you know the reason
you sit for hours
…absorbing the rhythm of nature

…and so the journey of creation begins anew as I prepare to dive into wintry solitude with my whispering muse.

I heard an old song, sung

Black is Black

about loss and gain

harvest and lack

when our heart bleeds ink

onto paper thin

can the poem wrought

soak into our skin

leaving trails of silvery

tears in the dark

in circles round

a luminescent track

in an ark

…of pain

we are told is gain

yet

black is black

in soft, velvet folds of night

and without the dark

we cannot see

…the light

Walk softly… tread gently… surrender to the season’s muse… Awen /|\

Penny 💚🙏💚