Beauty in decay - by Lu Hersey

This year has spun by, despite the never-ending cold, wet January and the bake-us-all-alive summer - and here we are at the autumn equinox already. A brief point of balance in the year, when night and day are of equal length. It always makes me think of TS Eliot's Four Quartets (even though I never really understood them) and a few lines of Burnt Norton that resonate:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 I find it a good time of year to reflect and gather in ideas, create a store of projects to ponder and to work on during the darker days of winter. Outside, there's already the smell of fermenting apples under the trees, and the dawn Avalon mist has started forming over the Levels. The leaves are turning and soon will be in full autumn display, a swan song before they shut down for winter. 

There's a haunting beauty in decay. Something new always comes from it. At the recent twenty-five year memorial for 9/11, I revisited a programme I'd first heard on the radio when I went to register my father's death last year. An episode called Momento Mori on Radio 4's Sideways. 

The programme introduced me to the extraordinary sounds of the Disintegration Loops, a series of albums made by musican William Basinski. He'd been trying to transfer tape recordings he'd made earlier onto CD - only the initial magnetic recording tape he'd used had decayed. Instead of giving up in despair, he found beauty in the remaining sounds, and from the tapes created the Disintegration Loops - one of the most haunting soundscapes you're likely to come across. 

The part of the programme that really sticks in my mind is about half way through - when Basinski talks about playing the Disintegration Loops, which he'd just finished recording, through loud speakers on his NY warehouse apartment roof, while watching the cloud of dust that followed the collapse of the twin towers. A totally surreal experience. He later dedicated the entire four albums to the victims, and the Disintegration Loops hold something of the haunting sadness of life passing. You can get a flavour of it here - not to everyone's taste, but extraordinary none the less:

Autumn brings an acute awareness of the year passing, with hints of that haunting feeling of decay. Here in Glastonbury, people gather on the tor to celebrate the equinox (the autumn equinox is one of eight fire festivals in the wheel of the year), and the bongo drums play on well into the night. While I appreciate the importance of community celebration (honest!), I prefer to go the coast to find a beach away from it all. If possible, timing the visit to coincide with either high tide or low tide (depending on daylight hours and the journey time it takes to get there). When the tide is either right out, or right in, there's often a patch of relative calm, like a breathing space when the world stops for a moment, before the tide turns. When you can catch a sense of that still point in the turning world. 

It doesn't really matter what I'm writing, or trying to write back home - or what I will write in future or have written previously. For a precious hour or so, I don't worry about any of it. 

Then it's time to go back and prepare for the winter to come.

Lu Hersey

https://www.lu-hersey.com/

Measuring your life in geological time - by Lu Hersey

It’s coming up to the autumn equinox, and it seems to me as though time is speeding 

up (this feeling gets worse as you get older). So in view of time passing, here's my mother's favourite poem, Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now, from A Shropshire Lad by AE Houseman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Yes, I know it’s not cherry blossom time here in the northern hemisphere, but maybe substitute autumn leaves instead. The poem is more about our allotted lifespan, and making the most of it. Also, having reached my threescore years and ten, I might not be here to write this piece come the spring. In fact, owing to the transient nature of life, neither might you. (Hopefully we both will be, but you get the point.)

The equinox is a day of balance between light and dark, before we head into the shorter days and longer nights of winter. It feels like a poignant turning point in the year, and for me a time of reckoning, weighing up what I’ve achieved and what I haven’t. Watching the hedgerows fill with ripening berries and the leaves start to fall, I think more about the interconnectedness of life and death, the idea of infinity, and about the strange nature of existence.

There’s not nearly enough time left for me to come to grips with it all. I’ve already started to aim for smaller goals. I’m unlikely to achieve, say, world domination, or learn how to read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. I’m not even sure whether I have time to finish another novel, though I’ll probably make a start…

Anyway, according to Einstein's theory, time is relative. I can’t hold the concept of E=mc² in my mind long enough to explain it to you, so here's a terrible short version written by Google AI (sorry, but it would take me eons) 

‘Relativity is a theorem formulated by Albert Einstein, which states that space and time are relative, and all motion must be relative to a frame of reference. It is a notion that states laws of physics are the same everywhere.’

Great. But my concept of relativity isn’t based on Einstein’s mathematical formula. It’s more about the way half an hour in the dentist’s chair feels far longer than half an hour out walking in the country, or watching a film. And how although the moon is only moving away from the earth by a tiny fraction every year, over a lifetime of 70 years, it’s moved 2.66 meters (about 8.7 feet) farther away. That’s more than twice the width of my desk. I’m so damn old, I can measure my life in geological time.

Thinking about evolution, I wonder how we’ve had moments of genius like inventing the wheel or wellington boots on one hand, yet somehow we’re still dominated by very rich, stunningly ignorant white men on the other. Homo Sapiens has been around for approx 300,000 years. If the average lifespan is 70 years, that means it's only been 4285 lifespans along the line of your ancestors until you got here. And for a lot of that time, there were other species of humans around too - we just happened to take over. If Donald Trump represents the pinnacle of our evolution, one can’t help wondering if neanderthals would have done far better…

Basically, this is all just an effort to try and explain what relativity means to me, and why we should probably try to appreciate every moment of life - even if that particular moment is in the dentist’s chair. The equinox is a good time to think things over.

I am still writing, though currently mostly non fiction while I skirt around the edges of the next book. But even though I'm definitely closer to the end of life than the beginning, perhaps I should reconsider the idea of world domination. Donald is a lot older than me and look at the mess he's making of it. Perhaps it’s never too late after all? 

Lu Hersey

Web: Lu Hersey

Patreon: Writing the Magic

Substack: An old hag's snippets of folklore, myth and magic

(This post is adapted from one I wrote for substack)

A creative ritual for the Autumn Equinox - by Lu Hersey

 We're approaching the autumn equinox, when day and night are of equal length. This point of balance in the year is a good time to assess how your creative projects are going - to decide what's working and what isn't, so you can adjust accordingly.

To think about your project from a different perspective, you might try making yourself a sand painting. Whether you're working on a book, a painting, or anything creative, a sand painting can help you adjust and balance your ideas, ready for the coming slide into winter.  (You don't need actual sand to make it by the way, it's just an umbrella term for this kind of ritual)

Take some time to think about how your project is going so far this year, and what needs to change. Consider the aspects you're happy with, and those you'd like to drop. 

Now start the ritual by collecting objects to represent all these aspects. To help me assess my current writing project, I collected some autumn leaves, a few sticks,  a stone, feathers and a few ugly things to represent problem areas I think need sorting. (If it's easier for you to do this ritual indoors, collect things from around the house like cutlery, candles, dried food, fresh fruit - or even photos if that's appropriate for you.)

Think about what you want each object to represent as you put them out on the ground (preferably outside if you have outside space, but inside is fine if not). Make a frame (a loose frame of sticks, or wool, or anything that works) to surround your objects, leaving yourself plenty of room to move things around inside the frame as you decide whether you want to keep them or not, and where you think they fit into your project.  

This is my stick frame with a jumble of chaos in the middle. It represents all the ingredients of my story, but not in any kind of order.

After some sorting of the chaos, the story outline is marginally clearer to me - but basically it's still a big jumble.

A bit of thought brings an improvement - I can now see what I have, and get an idea of where I'm going. I'm trying to make it work a bit like the hero's journey, but it definitely isn't there yet.

Taking the restrictive boundaries of the stick frame away has helped me get closer to my goal - but it's still not right.

To add a touch of magic, I exposed the pentagram at the heart of my apple (and it gave me the other half to eat while I thought about what to do next)

Having taken quite a lot away, I decided it needed something new - so I added a bit of flowery sparkle. But somehow it still didn't feel quite right. 

Better. I looked at this for a while and wondered if I'd done enough... 

Then I tweaked some areas, and brought a little light on the situation with the candle. I think all the elements are now in the right order and I have a clearer idea of what I need to work on as the nights grow longer - so I found the process quite useful. 

The idea of making a sand painting like this is loosely based on a shamanic ritual, more generally used to help resolve problem situations. Hopefully you'll find this adaption gives you some insight. If nothing else, it's a way to step back from your creative project and look at it objectively. Or simply to procrastinate. One of my key skills :)

Lu Hersey
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