The Daily: 5 September 2023

The year is full of seasonal rewards and splendors, momentary splashes of perfection in time before time flows on to new climes. Winter is crystalline, it is the season of icy airs and scintillating stars. Even where there is no snow, winter is drained of color, austere and structural, as growing things slumber. Spring is opening, daily rupturing changes. The world gradually shrugs off its lethargy and puts on its best glamours, enticing life to come out and dance in the growing sunlight. Summer is rampant growth and fruiting, the succulent season where all is smug with full-bellied maturity.

But autumn! Autumn is pure magic. Life distilled to its essence and, having accomplished all goals, paused on the brink to revel in itself. It is a season of fulsome scent, laced with lush sugar and the sharp tones of ash and rot. It is a season of vivacious color, grape-hued twilights hung with a yellow moon and blazing maple leaves against clear cerulean skies. It is a season of rich flavor, exotic spice and prosaic pumpkin flesh warming over a wood stove filled with applewood fire. Who could not be entranced by a season of ripe pears dangling free on the bough?

Autumn is the moment of satiated completion on the precipice of death, and therein lies its poignant enchantment. Autumn is the season of the witch, the time of turning inward to winter’s reflection and introspection, but not before the cider is tapped and the bonfires are lighted in cackling, not altogether wholesome, merriment. There is magic in the morning mists that lift to reveal a stunningly recast visage of the mountain, each day uncovering its changing hue, summer’s green shifting to carmine and gold — and finally, suddenly, the stark black and white of pine boles and birch over stone and bare stems. This is dark magic and, as such, is not soothing whimsy, but jagged and pitiless fact, as when the twittering birdsong of summer’s ripening is succeeded by the mutterings and harsh observations of corvids. There are omens in this wind… But death is not quite nigh.

All cultures turn inward in autumn, even those for whom autumn is merely the cessation of the rains. When nature turns to sleep, humans gather around the hearth and look to their state of their souls. Most couple the long farewells of fall with remembrance of those who have gone before. Many recite the narratives of their societies, sending odes to the ancestors and spirits of earth and sky. Offerings might be made in the summer, sacrifices are borne in winter and spring, but autumn is when we give thanks and set aside a portion of the harvest for gods and needful neighbors. Autumn is when we whisper gratitude to our memories of those who made us, setting up reverential altars to our predecessors, those who have gone to death before us and so gave us life.

In this culture of perpetual spring, it is hard to sense autumn, to make sense of this season of resplendent age and endings. We have turned away from death and bounds and so have turned away from time and season. Have you noticed that there is no word for the quality of finiteness? No such word as finity, the logical antonym to infinity. We harbor such fear and loathing for the very idea of our bodily unbeing that we have only one word for such things — death — which carries no connotations of cycles or reciprocity or obligation or continuation. We do not consider what might lie beyond the threshold of that doorway, since we deem anything beyond our own self, any state that no longer includes this ego, to be similarly nonexistent.

Instead, we create infinities for chosen selves in some super-material plane and damn all else to nothingness (if not eternal torment), never noticing that death is never a termination of life. It is a phase shift, a passing from one state of being into another. True, the self that emanates from this being may have an end. May. We don’t actually know. Perhaps, like all the matter of our body, our spirit migrates onward to be incorporated in new forms — but within this earthbound world. It is unlikely that the universe is bleeding out energy or order or mass every time a living being dies. Were that the case, all things would have long ago imploded, well before humans evolved to set their selves at the center of being.

With this fear of our unmaking, we turn from the changes that lead us on to that doorway. We try to hide the evidence of age like infants wiping cookie crumbs from our lips in hopes of evading punishment for looting the jar, not knowing that the mess on our fingers and the shifty guilt in our eyes give us away. We hide away the visible aspect of age and howl protestations to the world that we are changeless, perpetual virility and pristine youth. We do not want these marred and sagging bodies. We want plastic simulacrums of the days when death was on the far horizon, not yet even a blemish on the skin. And we want that unlife forever.

The witch is the grinning antithesis to this culture. She laughs at our futile dramas, setting her flaccid belly jiggling in merriment. She stands in blatant opposition to enduring youth, her wizened skin, greying hair and softened flesh all mapping time, a journal of change and a signpost pointing to death. Yet she is content. More than content, she is kind. She pities us in our delusions and social illness, and she shows us what it is to be an embodied human being, fully alive to this world, fully participating within this world, fully bonded to this world. The witch is at her most spellbinding magnificence when she plants her feet in the fertile soil of her homeland and lives manifestly without fear of time and change. She lives in time and shows her age.

In other cultures, old age implies wisdom. Respected elders are responsible for directing society because they have achieved the necessary wisdom through long embodied experience. In our culture, we turn from both elders and witches, but we do begrudgingly acknowledge that the witch is wily, often highly intelligent. There is a folk etymology that tries to tie witch to an Old English verb that meant ‘to know things’. This is often simplified to ‘wise’. There is little evidence supporting this derivation, however the witch does exemplify both wisdom and maturity. Not just knowledge, mind you, though the witch does know many things that seem to elude many other humans, but wisdom, the ability to use that knowledge to make discerning decisions. The witch gathers information from many sources and transmutes that data into beneficial action. She may choose to remain invisible from time to time, the better to observe and collect, and she rarely chooses to live within the community she serves, preferring the fertile edge-spaces. But she does not hide her knowledge or her age, and she usually gives very good advice. She dispenses wisdom. It is telling that in our culture, both old age and witches are shunned — because we don’t act with wisdom very often…

So what about wisdom is so abhorrent to us? Is it that wisdom is not to be found in our clever hands or able youth, but only comes through the alchemy of living in time? Is it perhaps that wisdom too often shows us reason to be humble, accepting of our bounded place in a balanced world? Do wisdom and witchcraft belie eternity? Both are intimates of time and age and the inevitability of that dark doorway to oblivion. You can’t be wise and chase after infinity. And witches don’t bother with such nonsense.

Autumn incites the witch in most humans. We become quiet and thoughtful, more aware of our skin and the limits implied in that boundary. Our eyes adjust to the growing darkness and our ears attune to the silent singing of ghosts. We feel the time as the trees appear to invert the season of growth, sliding backwards from verdant to vermillion to barren sepia slumber. We brew wisdom in that final cup of tea before bedtime.

Being a witch is not about casting spells for love or wealth, though there is nothing wrong with such things. But being wise means rising above those youthful, self-centered fancies and seeing the expanse of time that lies beyond each of us. It is visions in black mirrors of what is to come. The wisdom of the witch is the recognition of the role each life must fill before stepping off the stage — and understanding how to orchestrate that being and changefulness, how to midwife death in all its forms. But first… how to celebrate that full and terminal life.

This time of year is when we best glimpse the beyond. Some talk of thinning veils and fae visitations. I tend to see it more as the wisdom that breeds in darkness. Spring and summer are too glaring for subtlety. Even winter with its long dark nights is blinded by looking toward the candle-flame of awakening. Only in autumn can we truly see our undoing and embrace it fully. This is not to say that we run into death’s arms, but that we do not run away. And most importantly, that we live each day knowing it will end, that we do not squander this ephemeral sanctity of life, sacred because it is finite. Knowing death means knowing life. Without death, there is no life. This is the wisdom of age and autumn and change.

It is the season of growing darkness. Take that for the gift that it is. Gird yourself in midnight and march willingly into winter with eyes wide open… though you might keep a hint of a cackle about your wrinkled lips.

Be a fearless witch. Because it is time for the fall.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023