Liminal Time

Leave a comment

Considering the number of people who declare autumn their favorite season, the equinox receives pretty slim press.  This year it falls on the 22nd and, as always, it is one of the four quarter days of the pre-Christian European calendar.  Even among pagans it seems not to have had the same level of celebration as the other solstices and equinox.  I sometimes wonder if that’s because things are generally good already in September.  The intense heat of summer is over but the chill of October hasn’t yet arrived.  We stop using the air conditioning and don’t have to turn on the furnace.  It’s the Goldilocks month.  It’s part summer when living is easy, and part fall when the world is beautiful.  Like its fellow quarter days it is truly a liminal time.  

Liminal periods are always good for reflection.  No matter how much I want to savor this time of year, I have a feeling that it always catches me off guard.  There are changes afoot.  Starting Monday it will be dark more than it is light, and that will hold true until the sister equinox visits us in March.  These longer nights have traditionally made room for ghosts and goblins.  If we haven’t begun to store up supplies for winter, now is the time to start.  It’s the season when we all believe in magic, if just a little bit.  I’m one of those people who finds melancholy somewhat lovely.  It’s not depression (believe me, I know!), but a kind of happy sadness that the season itself is ephemeral.  Pretty soon people will be watching scary movies, but not quite yet.

Harvest is a joyful, spooky time.  Those trees that have been green since April now put on their colorful winter coats but soon will spend the colder months bravely naked.  Snow may come.  Fall is a prophetic season, warning us of what might come.  Monsters may be set free from their chains.  And yet there will be cozy indoor holidays when we can hunker down and recollect the year that has just been spent.  There’s a wisdom to seeing the quarter days as the spokes on the wheel of the year.  Like many wheels already rolling it’s futile to attempt to stop them.  They’re moving us to the next place that we’re meant to be.  It’s true that the autumnal equinox falls on a weekend this year, but it does seem to me a natural holiday.  And a time, like all holidays, for reflection.

Waiting for the Sun

2 Comments

Waiting.  It’s difficult in the best of circumstances.  It’s even harder when dealing with multiple sources of delay.  For example: it has been unseasonably cool around here for a few months.  Looking at the US weather maps, it looks like we’ve got just about the coolest temperatures in the lower 48.  September is usually reliably a month where you don’t need the furnace in these here parts, but that’s not the case now.  A slowly moving weather system has blocked the sun for days and our poor old house just can’t warm up.  I feel like Noah waiting for some sign of hope.  The weather apps all say, “oh, two or three more days…”  Endurance, I remind myself.  Stoicism.  Still, we need some sun about now.  But that’s not all.

In addition to wearing three heavy layers and my fingerless gloves (in September—and this will last until May!), I’m also doing my prep for a colonoscopy.  In case it’s been a while—that means a liquid diet for a day.  I need to wait until this time tomorrow to have anything to eat and my teeth are on edge because the allowable fluids tend to be sweet and I really need something salty with a bit of crunch about now.  I see I’m allowed ice pops.  But did I mention that it’s cold in here?  If it were a normal year at least one of these two things wouldn’t been an issue at this point in time.  Nobody that I know of looks forward to a colonoscopy.  I know I’ll barely sleep tonight and the whole situation ends up looking downright Dickensian.  Chilly, hungry, persistent rain.  All I really need at a time like this is just some indication that the following days might improve.  Don’t look to the Weather Channel for support.  No, rely on your Stoicism.  Endure.

The trick I usually use on myself is to dangle a small carrot—lunch will be in just three hours!—to get through a long, chilly day.  (You’ll be able to eat something hot…)  I suppose giving up caffeinated beverages a few years back (when the last colonoscopy was well forgotten), might’ve been a poor decision.  I sure could use a Thermos of coffee right about now.  And one of those solar headbands that tricks you into believing you’re getting some sun.  Hey, September’s my second favorite month, after October, so shouldn’t waiting be just a smidge easier?  I’ve been waiting for September since last November.  And still I wait.  Such is the human lot in life.  Endurance is important, I know.  But a peek of sunshine (haven’t seen anything like it for three days) in September—is that too much to ask?  Or at least a hot meal.  What would Zeno do?  (Of course, he did live in sunny Greece…)

Tuning Up

Leave a comment

Climate change is marked by its erratic behavior.  I can relate.  Nevertheless, one of my favorite things in the whole wide world is the slow transition of summer to winter.  Autumn includes that honeymoon time between air conditioning and furnace when you have perhaps a month of reasonable utility bills.  After that hot summer we had around here, this weekend showed why we call it “fall.”  I awoke yesterday morning only to feel the indoor temperature slipping into winter range.  (Seriously.  The furnace isn’t on yet.)  It was 41 degrees outside, a full five degrees lower than projected.  There’s a subtle insidiousness to morning chills.  I tend to wake around three or four, but that’s not the coldest part of the night.  No, that comes just before sunrise.  Morning connoisseurs know that.  It’s always coldest before the dawn.

Weather forecasting is a dicey business, not for the faint of heart.  When it’s getting uncomfortably chilly, a degree or two can make a difference.  You see, I get out of bed, throw on some lounging clothes, and go into another room where I won’t disturb anybody.  That means if I underestimate how cold the house will be, I’ll spend some time shivering until those who awake on normal schedules get up.  That, or I have to wear a jacket indoors.  I’m not above that, of course, but it’s only September.  Honeymoon time.  Global warming doesn’t mean it’s going to be hot all the time.  So all of this has me thinking about winter already.  It’s only September and I’m already wearing fingerless gloves.

I’m extremely sensitive to cold.  I attribute it to a case of mild frostbite I had as a teen.  The cold didn’t bother me so much before then.  My brother and I, dutifully awaiting the school bus, stood for the required half hour or so at the bus stop.  It was bitterly cold and there was no bus shelter.  When we were finally allowed to head home the pain was incredible.  My extremities are still chilled at the slightest suggestion.  On all but the hottest days my feet can count on being cold.  The  morning skies were a beautiful blue yesterday, suggesting that the predicted cloudiness of the previous night had not performed, allowing full radiational cooling.  Yes, global warming is real and all of us alive today will be dealing with it for the remainder of our time here on earth.  That doesn’t mean it’ll always be hot outside.  It does mean the honeymoon may be over. 

All Things Being

Leave a comment

“Equal” and “night,” in their Latin forms, give us the word “equinox.”  Today we enter the darker half of the year.  Interestingly, of the so-called “quarter days”—the equinoxes and solstices—this is the only one for which we have no ancient indications of celebration.  Like a birthday that goes by unnoticed, this feels odd.  Why, among the set of only four days—longest, shortest, and two equal—did this one fail to be noticed?  Well, perhaps noticed, but not celebrated?  The failure of ancient records may be one explanation, and perhaps other, near dates of note subsumed it.  In Judaism, for instance, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come around this time.  The ancient Celts celebrated August 1 and November 1, or thereabouts.  September is a particularly busy time.

Harvesting, in many places, gets its real start in September.  In more modern times, school starts up again.  Work schedules once more take priority and those “relaxed” summer hours are a thing of the past.  It’s easy to overlook this seemingly insignificant day.  It is important nonetheless.  For those of us who watch horror, it’s now more easily explained—it’s darker and that brings on one of the most primal of fears.  Halloween is coming, and if you haven’t prepared already, discounted pricing on picked-over merchandise will begin in coming days.  More and more houses will prepare for the haunted season.  Around here leaves are just beginning to change, but in more northern latitudes they’re well on their way already.  Pumpkins are already on hand at grocery stores and farm stands.  The days of summer sweet corn are over.

Not all holidays receive equal attention, of course.  Less romantically inclined adults simply work through Valentines Day.  And who even notices May Day anymore?  If you don’t spend money on holidays they don’t seem to count.  Who goes out and buys things for the forgotten autumnal equinox?  Nevertheless, many people say that fall is their favorite time of year.  It has a trickster element to it.  You awake and have to throw on some extra layers, but by mid-afternoon short sleeves may be sufficient.  Hurricanes may come ashore.  Some days will feel like winter, and others summer.  Transitions are like that.  The autumnal equinox signals the inevitability of winter but also the yearning and melancholy of the shortening days when color springs to light once again.  Forgotten or not, today is the harbinger of things to come.

The Day After

2 Comments

I don’t mean to be insensitive. Sometimes I get so busy that I don’t even look at the date for days at a time. This can’t be good, but I was surprised when the anniversary of 9/11 caught me completely unawares this year. That’s the kind of summer it’s been. Not acknowledging 9/11 to New Yorkers is like making ethnic jokes—it’s inherently offensive. The City is always subdued on this date of infamy. Coming the same week as Labor Day this year, I think my timing was just off. In my family, September was always the month of birthdays. My present to my brother of the 12th was late in 2001. I wanted to find something old. Something solid. Something time-honored. I wanted a sense of stability to return to a chaotic world. Being an inveterate fossil collector, I went to a local rock shop and bought him a fossilized cepholapod shell. It wasn’t much, but it was a message and a metaphor.

Today, being a birthday and a day after, feels a little like an apology to me. At the time of 9/11 I knew a few colleagues teaching in New York, but in 2001 I’d not really known the city. I’d visited a few times. I was still employed, although my personal career trauma was, unknown to me, already underway. And looking at the state of the world some fourteen years later, I wonder how much better things are. We haven’t suddenly improved, and as a nation we seem more deeply divided than ever. Candidates who resemble their caractitures more than actual people frighten me. The rhetoric is a sermon of doom. Have we all forgotten how that morning felt?

Television reception was poor, or it may have been the tears falling from my eyes as I watched, at the safe distance of Wisconsin. We’d just sent our daughter off on the school bus and now wanted her back home. I called my brother in Pittsburgh in a panic. The news had said a plane had crashed in southern Pennsylvania somewhere. It seemed the the possibilities of horror were endless that day. And yet. I awoke yesterday fretting over work. My mourning routine was harried and frantic. I didn’t even know what day it was. I glanced a paper headline on the way to work and realized that I’d overslept a tragedy. Some scars never heal. Those wounds cut by religion are the deepest. So we find ourselves on the nexus of a tragedy, a birthday, and a new year. How we respond is entirely up to us.

Time2Remember

Good Book, Bad Seeds

Leave a comment

A gray day in September. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. A stark melancholy races on the winds of a distant nor’easter. It is a perfect day for The Boatman’s Call.

Searching for land

Searching for land

I have to admit up front that I found out about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds from the Shrek movies. The soundtrack crew from the first two movies did their homework exceptionally well, tapping some truly desultory, lugubrious tunes from artists who don’t make the top twenty. I was so taken by “People Ain’t No Good” that as soon as I could afford it I purchased the album (The Boatman’s Call, not Shrek II). The album begins with the line “I don’t believe in an interventionist God, but I know darling that you do . . .” Throughout the album the achingly sacred and profoundly profane are blended in an eerily subdued way. The music is haunting and thought-provoking. Almost each track on the album has a biblical reference, but these references are mixed with what would be crude if handled with any less artistry.

All that I know about Nick Cave is what I’ve read on Wikipedia, but it is clear that he is well versed in the Bible and makes effective, if dark, use of religious imagery. Perhaps the reason I admire this album so much is that Cave’s ambivalence toward religious structures is so honest. He isn’t out to convert anyone, nor is he willing to let go of his religion. The religion that wafts out of the drafty attic of this disc mirrors the complexity that faith ought to possess. Especially on a dark and rainy autumn day.