Deep oak and lime are startling interruptions in open fields. Green against the brown, dead grass in the way blood startles. I have been home in my country for four and a half years, busily learning all its names, and the brown and fire of Australia have caught up. We smell burning and hear the sirens every day.
Along with this peripheral sense of threat, the silence of the August woods is eerie. Moulting birds fall into wary quiet and instead of silvery blackbird and robin songs, there are bickering tick ticks of robins, and the fights of squirrels. The undergrowth rustles with foraging birds, like hidden footsteps behind you, and young raptors add their wails to the general soundscape of dis-ease.
Lammas; the medieval tradition of ‘loaf mass’ celebrated the first harvest of summer at the beginning of August. Grain harvest, wheat harvest. It was cut and milled, and the first loaf made with the new flour was buried in the fields for luck – to give back. Time of hard work, energy, richness, abundance and bread, bread, bread.
But I’ve come to find it a strange time of year; this summer, and last. The quiet, the deadness after a July drought. The exhaustion after the mad growth and energy of spring; all the things we have done, and said, and written and fucked around with – this is what we now harvest in the blaze and heat of summer. The first time of the year that we are jolted into seeing that what we put in is what we get. How empty stomached are our harvests. Somehow, when the weather changes and the harvest of late September arrives; this reaping is more rich, more beautiful. We know what to do with it, we are busy storing, preserving, god, and I mean metaphorically as well, as we slip into the head-down part of winter. But this first one, we lie down exhausted, looking at what we’ve wrought, with our mess of dough in our hands, wondering what the hell we can make of it.
It is a time of unflinching reckoning. We must have the stomach for it; for our own bread and take courage. If we lay down with nothing in spring, we are hungry now. If we didn’t make good on what we promised, then that is what is sifting between our fingers. And if we don’t like our harvest, we bury it. Maybe it’ll grow better next year.
Let’s lay out our harvests. What are they? My great gathering is friends, who stimulate and amaze me, it’s culture in my community, it’s writing, it’s love. It’s the lavender, thriving with bees, the apples, the plums, the rowan berries. It is not so empty-bellied. But it’s a gyre, a turn; swivel them and what is sour, what and where is the need, is it met, should it be? What will I bury and spit over, onto the earth? Perhaps what I am burying is a sadness unavoidably resonant in the time of year because it feels like the beginning of an ending – of course it does. Even though the heather hasn’t started yet. There is still goldenrod to come, loosestrife, then asters. So in this pause between beats, between two great surges of life, this silence between words, breath, there is the duty of peeling the dough of your fingers and making good.
I always seem to feel a thriving hum in autumn. Hysterical with excitement about blackberries, gourds, chestnuts, apples, air that comes blue and smoked and welcoming. The harvests of August do not feel fruitful. But still: have the stomach to look at your harvest. Look at it. What the fuck have you made?
And what will you?