When I was a young adult, I found November difficult, a month of endurance, of feeling increasingly irritable and often ill, incapable of concentration and yet unable to relax, hungry but never an appetite for anything. November brought darkness and cold, but not the snow and peace of winter, lethargy and apathy, but no time to spare for moods. I did not like the commercialism, but I was just as guilty of leaning into the Midwinter holidays well before their season, not to shop, but merely to have some light and warmth and focus.
When I was selling kids’ books, there was a vogue for making “trees” for all the holidays. I don’t know if that is still the case, but I still sometimes put up a Halloween tree and a Thanksgiving tree, a distraction from my distraction. I cover them in silk leaves and orange lights, dent corn and small gourds. In the bookstore — which was named Alamosa Books, the “cottonwood grove” bookstore, with all sorts of tree-related themes — the late autumn trees served as ways to stay grounded in the present season and yet still sell those stocking stuffers to keep the bills paid. In October, the tree was covered in scary stories and autumn crafts. In November it turned into a blessing tree where the kids would write what they appreciated on paper leaves. Under the tree, we collected mittens and scarves, canned foods, and books for those who did not have as much to appreciate.
I used to blame the hyped anticipation for ruining the early winter, for forcing us to rush through this present time to get to the presents. I am not sure Christmas is all to blame though. The urge to rush is underlain by something more, something darker and less tangible, something far less easy to blame because we refuse to acknowledge it. Instead, we rush and we make holiday trees out of season and we keep our gaze firmly averted.
Early Winter is the beginning of the lunar year, but it is not a beginning. It is the dormant season between the prolonged senescence that is autumn and the gradual awakening that follows the winter solstice. This is the fallow time, the time of passive recuperation before the work of regeneration begins. Without this pause, regeneration is impossible. Regeneration is not unrooted. It does not miraculously happen on the instant in spring. It is a slow reckoning deep in the darkness, in the soil, in the womb. It is miraculous when it is revealed, but it takes that long fallow time before revelation.
Fallow is derived from old roots that mean “to fold”, alluding to turning — plowing — the fields in the autumn. The word eventually came to mean the plowed fields left intentionally unplanted, those lands that were left unproductive so that nature could replenish the soil. Soil kept in continuous production is quickly degraded, visibly so. Plant a field in corn repeatedly, and the yield is drastically reduced in just a few years. Even the height of the corn drops with every successive planting. The fallows allow for regeneration through an absence of activity. Fallowing is a negation, an erasure that creates space for renewal. But it is not the renewal. It is not the regeneration. It is nothing. And we don’t deal with nothing very well.
Similarly, November is nothing. It is after the pageantry of ending. It is before the excitement of beginning. The leaves are gone; the harvest is over. But the exquisite exhilaration of winter is still far off. It is in between, neither and nor. It is hard for a young person to fully be in November. Youth is active, too busy, too striving, too impatient for tomorrow. When you are young, all the frantic pace of autumn slams up against the hard stop of November. But the beguiling lights of December make you fretful, eager to skip over this dark lacuna in the year.
However, November is growing on me as I age. I may still like the lights, but I am also learning to love the darkness, I am learning to need the darkness and its restorative power. Darkness is creative. It is unformed and unseen and so can hold anything in its indeterminate flux. In November nothing is, so anything can be. November is silence. It is dim firelight. It is closed curtains and feet propped on cushions. November is the gift of wandering thought. November is croning time, when we are allowed, indeed impelled, to turn inward and let all things rest. How deliciously decadent!
You need not be old to be a crone. All things have that ancient darkness inside. Consider the moon. Every 29 days, our satellite is born anew, grows fat with light, and then wanes to a wan sickle in the early morning twilight. But the moon does not change. Our world is a constant cycle from new light to old darkness and back again. Some view the night as the primordial waters that refresh and renew even as they obliterate. But those waters are held within the day’s cycle. They are always accessible, though never comprehensible as things in the light are. Like the day, like the moon, we are, all of us, always maid, mother and crone — generation and growth, maturity and harvest, and then the fallow restorative, the dreaming time.
It need not be November to be croning time. Each nightfall ushers in that pause. In the long days of summer, it is easier to wish away the darkness and carry on with busyness all night long, though the body will eventually mutiny, claiming its crone time whether you have time for it or not. However, the early sunsets and late sunrises, the darkness growing with each day, the lack of definition and focus, the in-between-ness and neither-nor nature of November all conspire to shove your tired body into the comfort of a favorite chair with the lights turned low and a mug of tea to ward off the chill for a protracted period of nothing happening at all. Complete unproductivity. (Which, again, my spell-checker assures me is not a word, so much do we disparage down time…)
Croning time is, of course, more natural for the aged because there are fewer demands on our time. But I would argue that we all need November, every year, maybe a little every day. We need rest. We need to be unproductive for long stretches of time. We need the fallow time as surely as the fields do and for all the same reasons. We are less productive when we do not allow these unproductive breaks. We are less alive when we are constantly in motion and never allowing our bodies to recharge nor our minds to relax and just flow. We are less creative. No great inspiration ever comes while hammering away at life without a reprieve. Which maybe explains much about our inability to conjure up new ideas, new stories, new ways of being in these busy days. We don’t have enough November in our lives. We do not honor the crone and give her the space she needs to incubate the marvelous seeds of spring.
And when we do not honor the crone, she becomes twisted and cruel, cackling around on chicken legs and flying pestles, snapping her grey mare jaws at beauty and novelty, sucking all the juice from life. The darkness is restorative when we let it in. But if we blare our incandescent lamps into the night skies, keeping the darkness always at bay, then darkness becomes a terror. When age is neglected and dismissed as soon as productivity slows, then the aged are naught but a shiftless shuffling burden and the wisdom of darkness is lost.
We, in this culture, do not honor the crone. We have shut her away in harshly lit rooms where all that can be discerned of her is wizened skin and vacant eyes. We all do this, but men more so than women. Men fear unproductivity, and especially unproductive women. We are always to be fertile, never fallow. (Because it is so very difficult to dominate the crone…) But women know in our bodies that life is a cycle. Even our fertile years are filled with flows, from receptive fullness to reserved barrenness and back again. Every month with the moon, we age a lifetime. Men do not actively participate in that flow; and so they do not feel it, they do not understand it, and they tend to fear it. What is a mid-life crisis but a realization of unproductive time? The recognition of erasure. Feeling the embrace of the crone. When life is linear, then rest is death and November is abhorrent.
November under patriarchy is jingle belled commercialism and strident demands on our time. We begin the month with a sugar crash and end it bloated with turkey and mashed potatoes. There are irritating carols lauding lives we’ll never lead and shrill exhortations to spend money we don’t have. The darkness slams down on every day before we get off work and does not relent again until we are back at our stations, as if even the sun is saying that only this is real, only this is worthy. When most of us do wage work that is anything but valuable time.
November in this culture is a turkey tree just for the lights.
What would we learn if we learned to love November for itself? What might we accomplish if we gave over every November to unproductivity? What would we know if we knew the crone in ourselves, if we let her be when we needed her to be? What wisdom would we gain? What beauty would we discover in the fallows?
Most of us do not have the freedom to embrace the crone. We are chained to the linear clock, regardless of time or season. But if those who had that leisure were to stop, were to just be quiet, were to rest so that the rest of us might not be janglingly needed for just one day, for a night, for a November… What might we conceive in that dark oblivion…
When I was young I did not love November… now, I find I need it. I think that is all the more true for this restless culture.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
This is so different from our November days, which get lighter and linger for longer; when the weather teases with warmth and cooler weather in unequal measures; when we embrace the first rains; are in awe of the new greens; seek out wild flowers; feel the freshness of a new beginning … we never experience your kind of darkness and cold, however, so tend to be busy throughout the year. Individuals, that is. The farming cycle is like such cycles in most places.
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