Do You Fallow? Why We All Need The Season Of Rest

October 22, 2015

Do You Fallow? Why We All Need The Season Of Rest

The pumpkin season is upon us – they’ve been in the shops for weeks and these plump orange friends, along with the ghoulish outfits and chocolate eyeballs also on the market shelves, herald the fact that the commercially busy time of Halloween is not far away.

Whether you intend to hunker behind tightly closed curtains to escape the trick or treaters, or you’re likely to embrace the evening with a glass of something warm and alcoholic around the barbeque after taking the kids around the neighbourhood, I think it’s way too easy to miss the real value of the season.

Let me explain.

I’ve always disliked autumn.

Or rather I’ve tried to dislike autumn but despite myself, I’ve always found too much to enjoy: iridescent red/brown trees; leaves falling like snowflakes; hidden fungi and bright shiny conkers like gifts in the grass – all pleasures I have reluctantly and even guiltily fallen in love with.

Conkers — Little shiny gifts in the grass

Now, I really do love summer and I am very open and up front about this. Where do I start? Is it the rosé left to lose its chill on a patio table, or warm sand in between your toes while catching the drips coming down a cornet or the disorientating but quietly pleasing first afternoon of the school holidays? For me, the pleasures of summer are deep seated and long awaited.

And then the year turns and autumn slips in while you’re not looking. New shoes are polished, shirts buttoned and hair pig-tailed for the new term, the warm sunshine always seeming to last a little longer than expected. The green lawn you battled with over the summer has become brown with leaves, the blades of grass stumpy as their growth slows.

Before you know it, October happens, leaves drop in the strengthening winds and one morning you wake to suspect that someone might have tampered with your alarm because suddenly your feet are hitting the floor while it’s pitch black outside.

For me, this is where the wait starts. With every leaf that falls is the latent desire, almost an impatience, for the buds of spring.

That is, until now.

For now I feel I understand a little more of what it’s about and it all started with a conversation about the festival of Samhain.

I will explain at this point that I am not a witch or a Wiccan. I’m pretty happy for most people to go about whatever route to spiritual satisfaction they wish but I’m not one for being persuaded to any particular faith: I’m more of a spiritual tourist, you might say.

A friend of mine mentioned she was having a fire feast for Samhain – which, through many permutations has become what most know as Halloween. I’m no expert, so I’ll offer no comprehensive definitions here (although it is well worth a look up on the web) but what I did glean from our conversation was the notion of fallow: the fire feast being the last of the harvest festivals, the start of a new year and the beginning of a season of rest.

The fire would have served to not only dispose of the by-products of harvest but also to light, celebrate and appease – an opportunity to clear out and hang out after a long period of intense activity and hard work.

This led me to think that we have no sensible concept of rest in our modern 24/7 365 world. Even our sleep has to be discussed, prodded, analysed. Are we getting enough? Is our bed suitable? An article I read the other day asked ‘Have you scheduled down time?’ (Scheduling ‘down time’? Surely a more obvious oxymoron has never existed.)

But fallow season? This denotes a stoppage. The trees will drop their leaves until their branches are bare. The bracken will die back to the earth. Some mammals retreat to their burrows and sleep until spring.

It’s shut down time: the earth has pressed the restart button.

I have decided this is what has always bothered me the most about autumn: the return indoors until spring. During the summer, as long as it is light, I am outside washing the car, the windows or pottering in the garden. I pop out for some shopping or hang washing at four o’clock in the afternoon, safe in the knowledge that it will be dry by ten. I run by the river, ride my bike over to the park with my daughter for a go on the swings before bed or laugh with my friends over wine, while the bees work the flowers in the pub garden.

But up until now I have not understood that the fallow season a necessary rest, not just a reluctant temporary stoppage. That this is not a death: only a sleep and a vital one at that.

It is not a time of inactivity, just a different form of activity.

It is a time to regroup, to learn new skills, to deepen and develop relationships.

Just as, below the ground, the trees will store their nutrients, ready for leaves and fruit the following year, we as human beings need to do the same. I feel like we have lost our concept of rest – light bulbs and televisions illuminating the spaces we used to sleep in during the winter. And as air freight has made it possible to purchase strawberries long beyond autumn, I believe we have lost the concept of harvest and how grateful those who have gone before have been for it.

I’m not suggesting that we go back to the dark ages before electricity and ample food but what I am suggesting is that some of the anxieties we have today (mine being the waste of time retreating indoors presents) arise from our lack of connection with the turning seasons, the cycles of life and the inevitability of death.

We need to remember that we are merely earthly observers and although we have learned to tinker (quite effectively, in some cases) with the outcomes of these turnings, there has to be more than a going with the flow – when it comes to the inevitable changes the year (and indeed life) throws at us, there has to be an active engagement.

So, in a break from what has gone before, I’m going to enjoy the fallow season this year. I’m going to dust off the board games, find my crochet needles scattered around the house and browse awhile my collection of dog-eared food magazines for well-loved recipes.

We’ll pull on walking boots and sweaters to catch the odd, brief, bright day and enjoy the sun’s ingress through the leafless branches.

We’ll laugh as we wipe marmalade muffin crumbs off our hibernation blankets on a Sunday afternoon.

And we’ll talk, reconnect, read, learn and enjoy the fallow season, all rested and ready to re-emerge in spring, ready for a new year.

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June 3, 2015June 4, 2015

Spending a weekend in Falmouth

Going home has always been a restorative thing for me. Driving over the Tamar, I take a huge breath of good Cornish air and then another as I circle above my home town of Penryn, where the new Combined Universities in Cornwall has sprung up on the grounds of what was Tremough Convent. Glimpses of the river going out to Falmouth Bay never fail to catch my breath and bring back memories of walking the fields high on the hill with my mother as a child; ripping grass from the verges to feed the horses, fingers stained from blackberry picking. There was less traffic then.

But my story is about Falmouth, where my parents now live. The car park on Fish Strand Quay is one of the best places to see the historic waterfront and it’s one of the first places I head to when I’m home. Half way along is the building that was the Royal British Legion – a building that my Dad has strong links to as did his father before him. It’s now home to the Arwenack Club where my Step Mother is a key player behind the bar. Yes I did spend much time in there with my family over the weekend. Yes, I did drink much beer. Yes I did sing karaoke on Sunday evening. And the quality of music of the Rockabilly band Chrome Deville was matched only by the jivers on the dancefloor. There’s something very special about watching the sunlight fade over the water as the lights of the docks come up – over a pint and some lively banter of course.

This is where WordPress could do with a Smellovision plugin. The lane heading down from where my Dad lives towards Swanpool beach is always vibrant with bluebells at this time of year but it’s the scent of the wild garlic that is overpowering. An evening walk down to the beach with the kids and Buster often involves signet spotting on the pool and a hedgehog ice cream on the Swanpool café decking overlooking the sea. (A hedgehog ice cream involves Cornish ice cream, clotted cream and toasted chopped hazelnuts by the way – it’s heaven’s heart attack in a cone!)

The rocks at Swanpool Beach — Swanpool beach – St Anthony lighthouse on the other side of the harbour is a pin prick in the distance

Swanpool Beach. This place means much to me. The small specks on the rocks are my son leading his little sister over the rocks – much like my brother used to do with me – and the path leading up on the cliffs towards Gyllingvase was where I used to walk with my Granddad when I was a child and where I sometimes run now. This is also where I used to bring my son after school, many years ago – we’d have tea on the beach and he’d play in the shallows when the heat of the summer day had passed.

Clean, cool air came off the water as I sat and watched the guys fishing off the rocks and the smell of the barbeque their friends had just lit for them just up the beach from me wafted out to sea.

Swanpool Beach and flip flops — Swanpool beach looking out towards Stack Point

So I did what any girl would do when left alone on a beach in the evening sun – I slipped off my flip flops and buried my toes in the sand.

The next day we drove back. ‘Til August it is then.

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May 22, 2015

Time to go home

I’ve been getting a little hot-headed recently, which can only mean one thing – it’s time to go home to Cornwall for a while.

Time to sit in a pretty tea shop with my pretty Mum and watch the water washing around in the harbour.

Time to take my Dad’s hooligan of a dog out on to the clifftops.

Time to sit in the social club where I used to sit with my Dad when I was a kid and where he used to sit with his father when he was kid and watch the lights of the ships in the harbour come up as the sun goes down.

Gulls on the beach — Where the Queen of Small Things goes to rest (those gulls had better stay away from my pasty)

Time to breathe some good air, catch up with some good friends and enjoy some peace away from the constant noise of the traffic.

Time to run the promenade, eat giant ice creams and have a Rowe’s pasty.

Ansum.

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April 1, 2015April 1, 2015

The best things about finding the right kind of community

My children have been my inspiration and my reason to find a community that works

I grew up as part of a tightly-knit religious community. It’s a very closed, secretive group and when I decided I could no longer be a part of it, I part jumped/was part booted out and found myself very alone. With a new baby, an imploded marriage and most of the people I’d spent the first twenty four years of my life with now crossing the street rather than look at me (their policy on shunning is pretty severe) I spiralled into depression.

Me and Paul: we've been through a lot in thirteen years. — Me and Paul: we’ve been through a lot in thirteen years.

Wind forwards sixteen years and I’m happy and healthy again. I’m at the centre of a network of people of my own making and I smile a lot these days.

How did I get here?

There is no doubt that humans are hard-wired to function as part of a community. I’ll concede that we all crave personal space and solitude sometimes but study after study has shown that people are happier and healthier for longer if they live within a social network.

There are, of course, problems with the above: relationships can be toxic; can break down; can be subject to harmful conditions and a whole myriad of other issues.

But consider the theory that pre-historic Homo Sapiens outlived the stronger and physically more able Neanderthals because they had the mental ability and drive to build strong relationships outside of the clan. (This article from the Guardian in 2013 makes for some interesting reading.) Networks are so important to us that perhaps we could adopt or find ourselves staying within a less than beneficial group out of necessity.

Looking back, I have no doubt at all that the biggest contributing factor to my poor mental health in my twenties was loss of community. This is why I now regularly visit pages on Facebook to help those who have just left my old religious group to come to terms with their loss. It’s a grieving process that is all at once liberating but also deeply upsetting and the religion’s shunning policy is one of their biggest tools to suck former members back into the fold (unfortunately, it leads some people to suicide).

But things do get better, life does improve and you can build a new support network.

We all need a good role model — Drinker of tea, maker of cakes and lover of daffodils, magnolias and agapanthus, my Mum refused to be separated from me and left the religion at the same time. She rocks.

So, I’ll not focus on the negative here but rather the ideas I would have like to have shared with my newly free but utterly deflated twenty four year old self (and these are things that I regularly share on those Facebook pages):

It takes time. It’s weeks, months, years of talking, texting and meeting up. Sometimes there are times when you fall out with someone, offend them or rub them up the wrong way but coming back from these situations and carrying on regardless makes for stronger links. ‘Bumping along’ as my Dad would say.
We have so much to learn from each other. Whether you are twelve or ninety two, I have something to learn from you and your view of the world and you from me. When we stop learning, we die.
Don’t be afraid to give. The singer Macy Gray sings “spread your rubber lovin’ and it bounces back to you” and I love this concept. The goodness you send out may hit a few walls or pavements before it comes back but it will – and rarely in the form you sent it out in.
Learn to trust because people are rarely inherently bad. They can be damaged, a little broken, strange in their reactions and strange in their habits but trust your gut and build links with people who make you happy.
Remember that sometimes you have no choice but to distance yourself from those who constantly dent your self-esteem. It’s just not worth it.
Finding the balance between self and community isn’t an exact science. You have to sacrifice personal choice and comfort to one extent or another in return for the rewards of being part of a community but others will have done the same for you.
Sometimes you get to choose your companions, sometimes you don’t. Whilst I genuinely loved the community which I grew up in, the sinister controls behind it were damaging. In order to stay, I would have to have given up so much of myself – in other words, the price was too high. So there are times when cracking out on your own and finding a new clan is the only thing you can do. This takes courage.

And it did take courage.

My Dad and my son in the social club where I thankfully spent the other half of my childhood. My Dad sat here with his father before him. It's home to me. — My Dad and my son in the social club where I thankfully spent the other half of my childhood. My Dad sat here with his father before him. It’s home to me.

So I find myself with friends who are mothers, fathers, writers, entrepreneurs, painters, dancers and musicians. I think of the faces I see at my craft group, my toddler group, the parents at school, the houses of my family and friends and I see stories and a life shared. There is laughter in the lines, genuine interest behind the words and light in their eyes. Sometimes I hold my belly and throw my head back in laughter and at other times, I cup the tears for their sorrow in my hands – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And then there are the few friends that I grew up with who also left the religion. We have a very special connection that won’t ever go away.

I’ve built my community, my way and I feel very lucky to have been able to choose the people I want in it – but it’s not been easy.

And then there are the humans that have accepted me into theirs. I feel grateful to them too.

Here is where I have to stop blogging for today. A friend has taken my daughter to the park this morning so that I can write and they will be home again soon. I didn’t drink at quiz night at the pub last night so that I could drop her and her family home in the car. Sometimes, my back gate opens and her husband comes in with a tub of freshly made, fragrant curry that she’s made for my family and I’ll send him back with a warm chocolate cake for hers.

It’s the right kind of community for me and I feel so very thankful for it.

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