the deep autumn.

The tree outside my living room window is my own wheel of the year; the ostentatious bloom and fade of its branches, the shifting shedding shimmering cycle of passing months.

It was Samhain last Monday - the witch’s mark of deep change, a warning of the dawning winter - and I sat comfortably in a t-shirt. Autumn reared up but summer heat had knocked her back down, insistent on another round. The calendars are all wrong now, we have steamed and bullied and wrenched them out of season. It should have been a splendid extravagance of crimson which fell, almost overnight, into an ankle-deep cacophonous pile but now the branches are patchy, a small animal paused mid-piss at the footfall of a predator. Stop start, part alive part dead, a Persephone tree whose mother can’t recall if she heard the door slam. The sun falls strangely here, it does not follow the boxed up days you carried on shore. This tree should never have been here at all. No wonder it is confused.

I have invented a new neurosis purely to diagnose myself: Seasonal dysphoria. Perhaps you have it too. Our bodies are in one hemisphere, but our minds are in the other. Colonial calendars insist upon the uncanny: Easter pastels pasted over the burning orange of autumn outside, snow-covered Christmas decorations hung for sweat-soaked shoppers, where the sun is out too late to watch the fairy-lights turn on. I sit with my back to the window and scroll through the changing seasons on the other side of the world. Social media is celebrating the birth of spring as I fill my hot water bottle and suffer through the dead-skin-dust burning smell of the first gas heater run of May.

The cultural dominance of Elsewhere means I struggle to exist, bodily, in the Here. I am performing a part but have learned the wrong lines.

I tell myself it means I can have both. The spooky, witchy Pagan fall into winter as the clouds gather grey and pink over scarlet leaves, and the tacky American-candy Halloween in October. The best of both worlds. Or at least, half of each which should equal clarity, but irrational navel-gazing does not follow the rules of logic or mathematics any more than the tree branches knows that autumn’s wrath is overdue.

I once attempted to learn to forage, a new skill I reasoned would help me befriend the seasons. But the rain didn’t fall in time, so we left with barely a handful of fungi, deflated hopes and a popped tyre. I try to remember now the way the trees smelled, the damp caress of the bracken against my coat sleeves, the enveloping silence of the forest. But my mind keeps focusing on the swinging basket, empty. The increasingly exasperated footsteps as we tramped deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, eyes down. The fear of missing out, distilled into a tour group experience.

Online I squirrel away content for later, selections of spring recipes and books and craft projects I will never remember to look at. Because come October the cycle will have turned again, and I will be bemoaning the lack of autumn vibes as sunburned trick or treaters roam the streets.

I try and force a reconciliation with the current. I am selective with my music, my movies and tv shows, with the ASMR videos I listen to in the desperate insomnia hours of the morning.  But there is only so much that Gilmore Girls and Fleetwood Mac can do.  

The truth is, there are two stories being told, two songs playing, and trying to listen to both at the same time is ruining both. The only cure for not being there is to be here. To mute one song and step outside to listen to what the other is singing. 

The cycle is late, but still slowly spinning. When I looked out the window this morning, the tree was all crimson.