On Sunday afternoon, the UK entered autumn courtesy of the autumn equinox. I had, of course, been waiting for this moment since March, and yet I was slightly taken aback by how different my world felt today, when I went out with the dogs early, as there was a gap in the rain, and it all seemed drastically mutated from a mere two days ago.
The leaves on the trees and the ones scattered in the streets by the wind; the darker low-level clouds and the slanted light; the morning lighting up just before 7am whilst the sun already sets at 6:50pm.
Autumn instils that sense of hunkering down in the most active of hearts; and whilst I am not one for doing stuff in some random fashion, for its own sake, I am definitely one for cuddling my own thoughts and staring out of this very window as I seek to make sense of the minutiae of life.
I think of John Keats and smirk; of course he wrote an ode to autumn, who on earth would write an ode to summer, with that relentless light preventing the mind from quieting itself? I only liked summer when I was a child and had no problems and was off school for weeks on end.
Autumn, particularly as an adult, is much more my kind of thing, as I manage to go for a brisk walk without sweltering like a pig in a foil blanket, and as concentration is back to the fore and with a vengeance. Why is it that I am still ploughing on at 4:30pm when six weeks ago I was dead and buried even before the day had started?
It’s the power of autumn, I tell you, and its dynamic force field of fresh new energy full of the promises of new beginnings.