The coming dark

Arriving home at the turning of the seasons

This is my time. I love the coming darkness. What it invites. The ink nights. Shadows against the sky. Glow of candle light that feels just a little more inviting. Returning home at the beginnings of the darker part of the year brings me excitement. I am ready for its embrace.

I arrived home nearly two weeks ago from my family trip to China. It was bursting with activity and I enjoyed its chaos. It was overcast when I arrived back at Gatwick and I was a little too eager to get in the car home to change out of my shorts and into my trousers. I went from 35+ degrees heat to a chilly and drizzly 18 degrees (celsius). I found myself shivering on the sofa a couple of hours after arriving home. But I was still glad to return to my own bed and to see my boy sleep soundly again. Until we were both up at 3am and struggling to go back to sleep.

I don’t know if you feel this too dear reader but often I find I am living a dual life. On the one, is my everyday labour and responsibilities and on the other is my creative life. My creative self is where my emotions and art reside. And it is not the duality of selves that concerns me, it is the distance I feel between these two poles that makes me ache. Since returning home, my biggest companion of my everyday self has been bewilderment. I returned to my full time job the day after arriving home. The struggle from jet lag on top of forcing myself back into my ‘work head’ was compounded by an onslaught of problems in my job that I had to tackle. It took a whole week or so for my brain to finally click back into place. Alternatively, my creative self has felt a surge since returning home.

I have felt a new vigor for all things creative. I have felt the impulse to return to writing in a way that invites more. Before I left for my trip, I had been concerned with focusing down on my memoir and eliminating distractions but now I embrace the surge of new ideas, playing with new sparks of inspiration. My change in scenery and perspective has caused a shift in me to rattles against the rigidity I was previously tried to enforce. I want to write silly ghost stories. I want to write to push back against systems of oppression. I want to write my most vulnerable words. My first weekend home, I spent a few hours tidying and decluttering my office - refreshing the energy of this space.

I also have more plans in other areas of creativity. I want to return to fibre art - complete two projects that have been left hanging. I want to experiment more with lino cut printing. I want to finish a few crochet and knitting projects. And I want to experiment with rituals, which is more of a compulsion and less of a hobby but yet another from art embodied.

In this season, I am beginning to appreciate for the first time my need to create and to really own the title of ‘artist’. For much of my life, I had been concerned with assigning a label to myself, perhaps to make my activities more digestible when explaining to others. For a while, I was going to be someone who draws, then (and now) a writer. But in this season, I have begun to fully embrace all forms of art that I play with. I am an artist. My fibre work, sketching, lino printing, and rites interact and play with ideas that I write with. In this season, I embrace the importance of art and creativity in my life. I am hopeful in what this creative well, this space of play will unearth.

On my first Sunday home, I joined Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s womens circle Moss Mother Moon (which I highly recommend). She described how we are entering into the most feminine part of the year. I feel this deeply. I want to nest. I am ready to slow down. I am ready to nurture my home. I want to nurture myself. The dark half of the year reminds me of the seasons where I sat in the very worst of my ptsd. This began in autumn too. There, I allowed myself the space to feel everything for the first time. Safely, in the dark, before candle light I allowed my emotions, memories, and pain to sit alongside me, instead of forcing them away, or running away myself.

And so the coming of autumn feels like a return to myself.

I wrote this recently in a writing workshop held by the lovely Lucy Beckley. A goodbye to summer.

I hope the coming dark offers you some tenderness. Not everyone finds this season, and this particular transition a comfort. Please hold yourself in softness and kindness. Light candles. Make art. Lean into rituals. Care for your body and mind.

Wishing you warmth & ease,

Jen.