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As much as I’m opposed to living life viewed through a perpetual lens of rose-tinted delusion, I can’t help but wonder whether wearing glasses with a yellow orange tint might make these last few days more palatable!?

These last few days. Read, the first few days of September.

The End of Summer Blues sounds like a good album to listen to if it’s by Lana Del Rey and you’re listening to it at sunset on the beach supping cocktails and dangling your flip-flopped foot over the sand, whilst admiring your caramel-brown, tan, oiled leg.

Except this isn’t an album. It’s an experience that grabs me by the scruff of my neck each and every year. Like an unwelcome guest. An unwarranted surprise. A cold, wet fish slap in the face. There’s something about this time of the year, and I feel that it’s the seasonal change we tend to have the most challenge with shifting into.

Does autumn wait backstage, warming up as its time comes closer, squatting in woollen legwarmers, peeking and peering behind the light tulle summer-breezed curtain in anticipation, raring to get going, renewed, restored, and full of ungodly damp earthly treats to deliver to us mere mortals with a “it’s showdown!” call from the, erm, Director of Seasons!?

September has arrived with a drooping, sodden bouquet of wilted grey flowers and unglamorous plastic bucket loads of rain. It’s turned the dial down on the way in and invited its friend the wind as the necessary fashionable accessory du season.

I don’t like it. This end of summer launch of winter. And I’m not afraid to shout it out into this grand virtual ether either!

I’m not one of those gleaming and gunning with sweater, hats, and socks excitement.

Any more mention of Pumpkin Spice Latte, and I’ll throw its piping hot froth in your face.

And don’t even get me started on warm snuggles on the sofa with your blanket, dog, book, cinnamon Yankee candle whilst the light foregoes us all until next Spring!

Am I moaning?

Yes.

Look. I’m sure I’m not riding solo on this disgruntled train straight out of summer! Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?!

There’s the “fun is over” mentality. The back to school, sharpen your pencil, and get serious feel. The slight malaise and unease as the days get shorter and darker. Sure, there’s also some kind of curious excitement to the prospect of a new project, a blank page, new interests, and for some of us, the delightful thinking of what lies a few months before us.

Yet there’s something else here too. A melancholy. A nostalgia. A grief that arises echoing the loss of the light, the easy-breezy summer days, the lightness, the lounging in the warmth, and joy. Yes. I said joy. And I stand by that.

There’s a certain melancholy that comes to visit me as September knocks on the calendar door. It’s a familiar visitor. It comes with a sadness and a sigh and attempts to faux cashmere bubble-wrap me into the seductions of the autumn, a beloved season for many. The many whom I just do not understand. The many who sigh with a relief from the hot bright burn of the sun’s light and heat, and who can’t wait to open their cabinet of sweaters and gloves and socks and get all layered up.

God help me!

I’m not a “get the fire going” woman. My fire sits in the duende of the Mediterranean sun, and the passion of colour and the vibrancy of a culture that enjoys warmer days. I believe my soul got lost on its way to someplace exotic whilst the pelican was carrying it and somehow got spooked like a deer and dropped me into the North of England, in a city whereby you have to carry an umbrella pretty much every day of the year.

I’m not denying the contempt that solders these fingers to type these words. It’s present as I sit in a beloved café in the city, one with big windows and great coffee. Looking out at the gloom and rain and grey.

I think about colours and brightness and vivid shades of fluorescence. And I watch as people walk by on the streets, all clothed in black and brown and grey and blues. I spot the red on the sleeve of a waterproof jacket. The guy wearing it looks foreign.

This time of the year brings echoes. Echoes of memories from the past. A record playing on repeat. There’s a particular nostalgia that coats the air at this time of the year, as we clothe our skin in coats.

It brings a depression that causes fears to gather at the edges of my waking days.

In Chinese medicine, this is the time of the year associated with the lungs. With grief. In the Ayurvedic tradition, it’s a season when the Vata dosha is at it’s most prevalent. The wind outside highlighting our inner winds, that is, the tendency toward anxious thoughts, and feeling untethered and ungrounded. For some reason my ex-yoga-teaching mind always has the following phrase playing in it as we enter this time of the year, “What the hell is the Vata with you anyway hon?!” Makes me smile. A smile that melts back into this ache at my heart.

Sitting with these feelings and letting them be heard and felt, as I do with my journalling writing as prayer practice, both a godsend and a spirit connector for me, tears start to form and run down my cheeks. Tears for fears. A band I once listened to once upon a time as a teenager.

Ahhh. The teenager.

She’s here. She’s the one bringing the echoes.

September and it’s back to school.

Sure, I have new projects, exciting projects, to get stuck into this month. Things to bide my time with yet it’s time that is squeezing my chest in its anxious grip. Autumn time feels tricky and treacherous to my free-spiriting nature.

My bones feel cold.

My body no longer a seductive temptress of open sultry warmth.

Going outside, a must for those of us with a tendency toward seasonal despondency, becomes a chore. A must do on the tick-list of mental stability.

There’s a longing in me to leave. To avoid this time of the year. To jump straight from summer into spring. Maybe even adding a door dash of mid-winter in there too. I don’t mind mid-winter as much. You know where you are. Hibernation calls and for someone like me that’s tempting enough. But autumn. It just doesn’t leave me feeling good.

There’s a loneliness to autumn too. Especially as a (newly) single woman without a family of her own to all cosy down with on sodden days.

I don’t know man! Autumn just isn’t my time!

I’m wondering whether I can change my perspective though. Get to know it a little more without the contempt and despair and, let’s face it, disapproval and disrespect. After all, it’s a vital part of nature when we learn about how to let go. How to allow things to die. And how to be brazen enough to shed to nothing in the knowing that the new is waiting to come through renewed and rebirthed in a few months’ time.

If avoiding autumn means I avoid this letting go, this learning about loss, and the approach to death, then what’s that saying about me?! This horror loving woman, who has a moment respite from the gloom and heaviness to celebrate Samhain each year, loving death’s macabre dance.

Look. I could yadda yadda yadda all the helpful things one could do to support oneself at this time of the year. You probably already know them anyways. Sh*t like, cultivating a regular sleep pattern. Daily walks. Slow cooking stews and soups with this season’s sunny happy orange veg. Creating more structures, and repetition of habits, the power of frameworks to hold and bear us as the winds of change mess up our hair and tint our cheeks with fall blush.

Yet I think I’m just gonna hang out here a bit longer. In the moan and groan. Lamenting my friend the summer!

Though one thing is for sure. It’s the season to focus on grounding as much as I can. That old part of me that wants to “uproot,” both literally and metaphorically, isn’t helping me at all. So, time to drop the anchor. The autumn anchor. And to stay. Here. Present. And see what magic happens as I do!

Yikes!

Thanks for reading and I’d love to know your thoughts on the above, dear one.

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