the fifth season

The sounds this time of year sure are funny. It’s no wonder traditional Chinese medicine, with similar seasonal cycling, calls late summer the fifth season, when growth comes to a plateau, fruit sets, and all is still for just a bit. The outward, upward yang meets inward, reflective yin who will bring rest and let us fallow, and for a bit they overlap. What an auditory overlap!

The raucous celebration of summer visitors has mostly disappeared – the warblers are all gone, though I still see flycatchers and swallows. The cedar waxwings are flocking, now – along with the turkeys – and their unmistakable high-pitched ‘tseee’ is greatly amplified. They’ll be descending on anything with fruit (they are entirely fruititarians) pretty soon, leaving a laden honeysuckle bare.

It’s the mornings that are most different, with no more robins querying at dawn. The general uproar has quieted and old friends, here all along, have come back to the fore. Most notably the jays and the crows, who seem to have the reigns again. It’s a funny thing, a jay scolding over a slow and lazy ka-tee-did. A chickadee calling, not singing, while picking ripe tomatoes. And yesterday of all things I heard my personal bell of winter, the nuthatch’s puttering ‘yank!’ All while watering beds still full of flowering Echinacea, black-eyed susan, and daisy. The cardinals sing all summer, but now they have no competition in the thrushes and wrens for virtuoso status.

I think it’s just me – my ears are ready to hear the full-time residents again. I’ve luxuriated in the fancy and exotic and now I’m happy for jays and crows – the trees will take the lead in sensation, now.  A hillside of golden aspen and firey sugar maple – what punctuates that better than a jay? A thrush would be audacious, a gilded lily.

Before that happens, though, we have a plateau – we can watch the squash plump up and relax, a bit. Feel the last push of growth and sniff the oncoming chill, but slowly. Revel in the overlap, the fifth season. 

follow your word-path

Just a few disjointed ideas, but they feel as though they might, before too long, Become Something Interesting. For now they are utterly unrefined and potentially incomprehensible (sometimes the most entertaining things are).

Yes the way out is through, and words can be boots.

The grasp of pen or striking of keys become footsteps. They’re tethered in the smallest visible ways to that well within, and we are surveyors in the deepest spaces.

When you walk through the woods to monitor a plot, there is a tool that fastens to your belt, and drops a string that marks your path. So words, these ink blots (or virtual footpaths) are these traceable lines, and we drop them because we cannot see the whole from the start.

They trace our mire and make a path, they are the guide, the walking stick, the breadcrumb story. “A poem begins with delight and ends with wisdom,” says Mr. Frost. So it is, there is a spark, that conceptual butterfly. Or, rather, it is the actual butterfly who brings us into a heretofore unknown conceptual clearing.

But we have to follow it, we have to pick up our feet and go, through. But our hands can take us there, words can take us there. To the well within that thoughts fly in circles above but writing can penetrate, can skip us out of thought-ruts… and perhaps if we’ve slogged well enough we find that our own well hits a common aquifer.

That aquifer that waters us all, and the words of one can be a map that enables others a momentary deep, replenishing drink. A short cut, a word-path!

But you have to follow, and go through. Write with abandon. Wander. 

Just remember to bring a snack.