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Autumn, again
Monday, September 17th, 2007 04:52 pmThis morning was 45 degrees F. I need to put a coat in my bedroom so I can go out with the dog without having to walk to the other end of the house first.
This morning the light seems impossible low-angled. This afternoon it's worse; not yet 5 o'clock and the sun slants through the trees illuminating the undersides of things. Where is summer when I need it?
Next week is Mabon and we've a few skeletal bits of ritual half-planned.
I'm teaching Yoga (this is good) and doing Reiki (this is also good) and eating too much of the wrong stuff, and drinking alcohol (these are both bad). The alcohol in particular is nearly out of character until the past year or two. What's going on?
I know some of it, of course. After autumn comes winter, winter means I'm cold all the time, I don't like being cold at all much less all the time. But this is a negative future fantasy; in fact I own plenty of warm clothes and some lovely polarfleece sox, the house is beautifully heated and so is my car. In fact, something worth reminding the terrified kid inside, last year I spent two different one-week periods in places where the daytime temperature never reached 60 degrees F (indoors or out) and the overnight temperature inside my cabin dipped below 40 more than twice.
I lived through that. In fact, I thrived during both experiences, suffering the cold happily in order to receive the wonderful high magical work we were doing. In one of those places I even took lukewarm showers in a barely-heated room (though I think next time I'd just choose to stay dirty, maybe never get out of my longjohns atall).
So there's nothing to fear about cold, it's just an overdone memory of my first Chicago winter and the first couple of years after the (separate) hypothermia incident. Basic Self can relax, there's really no cause for alarm.
Oh, she says, I don't care about the cold (this is a lie, but never mind). But what about when we lost our Mommy?
Well, right. It's true that Mom died in late October. It's also true that all through September my brothers and I were working out the details of who would care for her next, and when, and where.
But I can hear my father's most-objecting voice insisting "Well I'll be damned if I'll do ___ just because ___!" and I feel my resistance rising. I don't want to spend the rest of my life hating autumnal weather and September light because that happens to be the time when my last surviving parent departed. And I think the truth is also that, on some level, I'm afraid I will be "damned" if I let that happen to me.
How enlightening.
Especially since, all through my childhood, Christmas always had a funny not-quite-heard minor chord of foreboding in my family, that other families didn't seem to have.
In my 50s a professor in grad school assigned us to do a genogram -- that is, a family tree with the dirt included. Turns out we have fathers dying at Christmastime on both sides of the family tree. So it's no wonder people stood about waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So what I need to do this fall, maybe, is find a way to make peace with the season. I used to love October light, the crunchy bright leaves, the old smell of leaf-fires (that we don't have now). I need to find a way to love this light again, to comfort my inner youngers about their fear of being reminded that Mommies die. I need to find a way to come peacefully to terms with my orphanhood even though it didn't happen until I was 55. Hmm.
This morning the light seems impossible low-angled. This afternoon it's worse; not yet 5 o'clock and the sun slants through the trees illuminating the undersides of things. Where is summer when I need it?
Next week is Mabon and we've a few skeletal bits of ritual half-planned.
I'm teaching Yoga (this is good) and doing Reiki (this is also good) and eating too much of the wrong stuff, and drinking alcohol (these are both bad). The alcohol in particular is nearly out of character until the past year or two. What's going on?
I know some of it, of course. After autumn comes winter, winter means I'm cold all the time, I don't like being cold at all much less all the time. But this is a negative future fantasy; in fact I own plenty of warm clothes and some lovely polarfleece sox, the house is beautifully heated and so is my car. In fact, something worth reminding the terrified kid inside, last year I spent two different one-week periods in places where the daytime temperature never reached 60 degrees F (indoors or out) and the overnight temperature inside my cabin dipped below 40 more than twice.
I lived through that. In fact, I thrived during both experiences, suffering the cold happily in order to receive the wonderful high magical work we were doing. In one of those places I even took lukewarm showers in a barely-heated room (though I think next time I'd just choose to stay dirty, maybe never get out of my longjohns atall).
So there's nothing to fear about cold, it's just an overdone memory of my first Chicago winter and the first couple of years after the (separate) hypothermia incident. Basic Self can relax, there's really no cause for alarm.
Oh, she says, I don't care about the cold (this is a lie, but never mind). But what about when we lost our Mommy?
Well, right. It's true that Mom died in late October. It's also true that all through September my brothers and I were working out the details of who would care for her next, and when, and where.
But I can hear my father's most-objecting voice insisting "Well I'll be damned if I'll do ___ just because ___!" and I feel my resistance rising. I don't want to spend the rest of my life hating autumnal weather and September light because that happens to be the time when my last surviving parent departed. And I think the truth is also that, on some level, I'm afraid I will be "damned" if I let that happen to me.
How enlightening.
Especially since, all through my childhood, Christmas always had a funny not-quite-heard minor chord of foreboding in my family, that other families didn't seem to have.
In my 50s a professor in grad school assigned us to do a genogram -- that is, a family tree with the dirt included. Turns out we have fathers dying at Christmastime on both sides of the family tree. So it's no wonder people stood about waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So what I need to do this fall, maybe, is find a way to make peace with the season. I used to love October light, the crunchy bright leaves, the old smell of leaf-fires (that we don't have now). I need to find a way to love this light again, to comfort my inner youngers about their fear of being reminded that Mommies die. I need to find a way to come peacefully to terms with my orphanhood even though it didn't happen until I was 55. Hmm.