Sunday, September 25, 2011

Ruins & the Harvest: Autumn Themes (23 September 2011)

“Beauty is a threshold event: it may make use of ordinary and uncomplicated things, but these serve as the bridge to a domain of meaning and significance.” (xx)

-        Robert P Crease
The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (2003)

In the turning of the seasons there are many thresholds; many events that mark the passing of time in its spiral dance; the onward movement of existence through the inevitable march of moments.  These moments may pass without ceremony; our lives slipping into the void slowly without notice or remark.  Or, we can mark these moments of transition; thresholds in the pattern of the annual cycle—and make our lives more distinct, more earthen, more tied to Earth & Cosmos.  By establishing markers for these thresholds, we can note time’s passage, nurture a quality of self-awareness that enables us to remember seasons that have passed, and plot out future directions and explorations for ourselves with conscious intent.  This ‘active pathing’ through the seasons lends vivacity to life in its inevitable passing, facilitating the generation of meaning out of what-is.
We are now in the cusps of Autumn, and I am marking time by engaging with touchstones, icons and familiar experiences related to the coming season.  The turn towards Autumn is usually first intimated, for me, with the coming to fruition of wild apples in the fields & woods through which I path in late summerwood saunters.  The smell of ripening apples is an early earthen sacramental of the onset of Harvest.  Then, in the latter part of August, I will always find that first leaf that has gone red and fallen onto a path where I am hiking, as if to say, “time is shifting; Autumn is coming.”  It’s always a leaf from the same species of tree: a longish, oblong leaf – three inches long or so – with barely discernible ‘teeth’ along its edges.  I pick one up, bring it home, and insert it in a book that I’m currently reading.  As I go back to books I’ve read over the years, I find these artifacts of earlier Autumns, dried between the pages where I left them, sometimes slightly discoloring both paper and text.  Time passes.  A final cue in Fall’s overture is when I come across the first ripening acorns in early September.  I always pick up three or four of them on a hike and bring them back to the house, where I place them on my meditation table.  There they stay until, in the weeks after Samhain (31 October), I start moving – spiritually; aesthetically – into the eaves of the Yuletide Season.
Once the overtures are concluded and I enter into the pathways of Autumn proper, two themes seem to recur annually in my poetic experiences, spiritual adventuring and aesthetic moods: Harvest and Ruins.
Summerwood passing; the time for Flourishment and Fructification have come and gone, and now Fruition is giving way to Harvest.  Summer is a time for ‘growth,’ ‘ripening’ and ‘bearing fruit.’  Autumn, thought of poetically and symbolically, is a time for Harvest, after which come the annual transition into dormancy and death.  Life ends, but first – if conditions have been right – there can be a culling of all that has been gained; a ‘gathering up’ of the fruits of living, and a storing away of its bounty in anticipation of the cold, dark journey to come; Winterwood – which looms on a not so distant horizon.
Though there is a ‘coming to fruition’ all summer long, many growing things have a longer time of maturation and only come to fruition in September or even October.  Where I live, the crops most indicative of harvest are wheat and grain corn, soybeans and pumpkins.  You see them in fields wherever you go, stretching out over the hills.  Beginning at the end of August, mechanical reapers can be seen moving through the varied fields.  All through September, harvest continues.
I experience a deep paradox between bounty and consummation at this time of year.  Fields as well as house-gardens are being harvested.  Nature’s fecundity is evident in the way that seed, once put in the ground, grows to maturity and bears fruit—assuming the right environmental conditions prevail.  Bounty, however, is always coupled with consummation.  While there can be repeated consummations throughout the growing season each year, there is a finality to the harvest (at least in the temperate zone where I live); a sense of mortality coming to the fore.  Harvest was long a time for celebration; especially in farming communities.  At the same time that we celebrate the harvest, however, an awareness of the consummation that it implies foreshadows the dormancy and death – actual (in the plant world) and figurative (in our spiritual lives)[i] – that inevitably follow the harvest season.
While ‘Harvest’ describes what is happening in the external world, it also metaphors a fact of our lives.  We have our own cycles of growth & fruition, followed by a settling into repose and finally death.  The seasons – Spring—Summer—Autumn—Winter – are an apt metaphorical parallel to the full cycle of a human life, and it may also accurately describe different phases within the space of a life.  Many of us go through cycles as life unfolds.  At different times in our lives, we start off on a particular path.  We path as far as that direction may allow, and then we may change course.  We may find that some other direction seems more fruitful, or we may be forced into a different life-course by circumstances beyond our control.  We may then ‘die’ to the previous phase of our life, and experience a new birth to a different direction.  Life, in this sense, is full of smaller births—deaths—rebirths.  A human life, however, assuming it is allowed its natural course and is not cut short by violence, disease or tragedy, may ultimately go through a final consummation before ending in the repose of the final death; the death of the body.
After Harvest each year, Nature comes to rest in the darkening, shortening of days, until Winter commences.  It is this ‘coming to rest’ that inspires my reflections on Ruins.  Ruins are to human culture what the reaped fields, denuded trees & bushes of wildwood & field are to Nature.  The red leaf and the acorns I pick up each Autumn intimate not only the coming Harvest but the fact of mortality.  The leaf is dead.  The chlorophyll in the leaf has stopped processing sunlight and thus stopped reflecting light from the ‘green’ range of the spectrum.  Thus, the leaf takes on the color characteristic of its physical structure; its ‘corpse’ – yellow, red, orange or brown.  The death and falling of the leaves can be taken as symbolic of the death of all of the vines and stalks of all the growing things that have made Summerwood green and lush.  It is also analogous, symbolically, to the ‘death’ of human structures. When humans let go of things they have made; when these things are abandoned or become neglected—they go into decline and become ‘ruins.’
BIRTH—LIFE—DEATH is the way of all animals.  We are animals, and as such we undergo this journey.  In the wider frame of human culture and history, what our species brings into existence also goes through stages like that of a life.  We build, we dwell in what we have built, and then we eventually abandon our constructions and move on to new horizons; we indwell new places and recreate ‘home.’  Once we have moved on, what we have previously built dilapidates_ and becomes a ruin.  Entropy wins out_ just as it eventually does with animals, plant life and all physical systems_ returning what-once-was to the Earth; to non-being.  Virtually everything on this planet comes from the Earth, and returns to it, eventually.  Ruins, for me, are intimately linked with the Autumn.  They evoke meditations on mortality.  Though I may visit ruins I know of all year long, during the Autumn I intentionally make time for this kind of personal poetic pilgrimage.
I’ve always been fascinated with ruins, and over many years I came to see them as an apt metaphor of mortality.  They are an analog to the end-phases of human life.  A ruin is a structure that has been let go; it is no longer being kept up, or it simply cannot be kept up any longer.  It has been ‘handed over’ to entropy.  Nature brings about the ruin of human artifacts once they are abandoned, and to reflect on this process of decay in its various stages is to find an analogy for our own eventual decline, decay and death.  As we come from the Earth, so we will someday be reunited with it in post-conscious states, the nature of which we can only speculate about until we experience them – or not – for ourselves.  A house or other structure, abandoned and returning to the Earth, goes through Stages of Decay, recognizable to anyone who has long visited some particular ruin, and that are as indefatigable as they are beautiful, in a certain ‘melancholy’ sense of that word!  Many ruins decay over time-scales longer than a human lifetime (stone and metal structures especially) while others seem to age and decay and fall to Earth even as we do ourselves, or even more quickly.
Ruins inspire in me what poets and other artists have long called ‘melancholy.’  The melancholy is a ‘beautiful sadness.’  It is an emotion characteristic of spiritual reflection on mortality.  It is not mere ‘sadness,’ nor is it a state of ‘depression.’  It is a manifestation of our awareness that all things must pass; that nothing is permanent—not even ourselves, much less the things we leave behind after we are gone (children, works of art, things we have built or created, maintained or reconstructed, etc.).  Nothing is immortal in the Earth & Cosmos—maybe not even the Universe itself.  Death is as natural as birth.  The end should be just as expected – and is just as surprising – as the beginning.  An existential melancholy tinges all genuine self-consciousness.

Over the course of my life I have had the good fortune to happen upon a number of ruined places; usually old houses, though sometimes relics of a more industrial time.  I have visited these ruins as frequently as I was able and came to have a kind of ‘friendship’ with them.  They became familiar to me.  I felt a certain melancholy ‘comfort’ sojourning amidst their wooden walls, bricks, broken windows and the artifacts of what once must have constituted a home or other human habitation and in this way have come to ‘know’ them in a poetic way.  I tried to understand their symbolic presence and was often led into interesting re-imaginings of their past; who were the people who lived or worked there and what kinds of things happened that led to the abandonment of this place?  Through all my experiences at ruins, I was reflecting on mortality.
There was once an old tool shed on the edge of a local wood, near where I grew up, that became a frequent haunt; a place that drew me to it when out on hikes.  I discovered it on a walk down a disused section of the old railroad near where I lived.  Just beyond a small trestle over a rural stream, a little foot-trail led off to the west from the tracks.  I was enticed to follow the footpath, which took me directly to the old toolshed.  It was quite a surprise the first time I happened upon it!  The path did not continue-on from the toolshed, which I thought was odd.  Whoever had walked that footpath – over and over again? – had gone from the railroad to the toolshed and back, but nowhere else?  The wooden shed was on the edge of an overgrown farm field; one that must not have been planted for many years, as there were young trees growing up here and there within it.  The shed was enclosed on three sides.  In front of the open side was an area that was also under the roof, which was slanted from the front to the back of the enclosed area.  Within the enclosed area was an old iron plough and a couple other farm machines, rusting away into the earth.  It was a lonesome place, and I loved standing by one of the posts that held up the old sagging roof at the front of the shed, listening for poetic echoes of human dwelling.
I never met or saw another human being there, though I saw numerous deer in the old field, saw ground hogs and squirrels and other small animals.  There was a conspicuous absence of “No Trespassing” signs.  The ruin seemed to have been lost to the web of human connections.  The shed was surrounded by Dame’s Violets in May, by Black Snakeroot and Thistle at High Summer, and by Goldenrod, Ironweed and New England Asters in the Autumn.  Autumn was my favorite time to sojourn there.  I was a visitant through a dozen years, quietly listening and watching as the structure dilapidated and finally collapsed, ultimately being covered in leaf mulch, under which I knew it would eventually become but a small ‘mound’ in the landscape.  On my last visit, I said my “goodbyes” as I left.  _A melancholy moment.  I missed it once it was finally gone, and I still remember the place fondly for the quiet lonesomeness I was able to experience there.

Ruins not only represent a ‘natural’ mortality but sometimes reference a more tragic scenario; a letting-go of something at the height or in the prime of its existence.  A house that has burned down, for instance, and now stands lonely in ruins on an abandoned property, ignored and forgotten, may remind us that life doesn't always end well, and that many things can befall us that we wouldn't have wished for.  Not everything in life works out for the better; disasters and disease undermine our ability to flourish and even to continue to exist.  Some people get caught in cycles of self-destruction or victimization from which they unfortunately never escape.  Many human lives have been wasted or are so tragic as to inspire only despair upon reflection.  Such has been and always will be, once dimension of the human condition.  Much of human existence has been lost or wasted that might have been saved, had the right set of circumstances prevailed; if love, justice and compassion had come to the fore instead of other forces.  Ruins sometimes inspire reflection on this darker dimension of the human situation and may inspire a humanizing hope which, if realized, might at least curtail much of the suffering we bring upon each other; though it would not end the suffering that results from the action of natural forces, nor bring an end to death itself.
To visit ruins is one way I’ve long found of engaging actively in a meditation on the decay and death that ultimately overtakes us.  Just like the structures we have built and dwell in, we may keep ourselves fit and healthy so long as we can, but – at some point – all our self-maintenance will fail, and death will become our imminent destination.  Hopefully, it comes after a life lived to the full; a fortunate flourishment and a culling of everything one can gather from one’s life-situation.  Yet we may find intimations of our fragility as well as the touchstones of flourishment in the ruined structures we visit.

A few years ago, an old student of mine emailed me pictures of a ruined church that he and some of his friends had come across near where they were in the habit of hiking.  He reflected in his email on the many times that we had gone hiking together down the railroad tracks south of the town where I was living at that time, to an old house, abandoned and decaying.  There, we would sit together on the weathered and moss-edged stairs of the back porch, talking for hours about spirituality and mystical experience, often engaging in devout storytelling and then a period of quiet meditation and reflection before returning to town.  My own experiences at that house – dilapidating over the course of the 30 years that I was a visitant there – became the inspiration for the Whittiers; the central family in all of my storytelling and the main focus of my book, Heart and Hearth (2009),[ii] which explores the subject of the loss and reclamation of a home; a house, a property, and of a family’s vision of life-together-in-Earth-&-Spirit.
I first discovered what came to be known to me as ‘The Old House’ when I was 12-years-old.  I’d been told of it by some older friends, who in the years to come often rendezvoused with me there.  Adventuring down the old abandoned railroad tracks, I arrived at the house, and was immediately captivated with it and its environs.  There was an old wooden bridge over a creek that came to be known – in my imaginative world of Ross County – as “Willow Creek.”  The house had burned but had not been fully consumed.  While the attic was gone, the first floor was relatively intact and safe to walk around in.  The ceiling of the second floor was charred, but the floor was relatively sound, though decaying owing to the rain let into the house through the roof, about one-third of which had been destroyed in the fire.  The cellar – lined with stone – was a cool, cave-like space, and always felt haunted to me.  There were old pieces of furniture and other bric-a-brac of a home scattered over what was once the lawn.  There was a spring down to the NW of the house, discovered a decade after our initial visit, and another small wooden structure near the access road as you went in.  This initial impression of the place became the template for the tragic fire that destroyed the first Whittier house on Deer Hill in 1949.
We often had the sense of tragedy at The Old House, though we never heard tell of who had lived there or why it had been abandoned after the fire.  We explored each room and became familiar with the artifacts of human dwelling left within its now empty spaces.  The idea of an empty old house; lost to human habitation though ‘haunted’ by memories of past dwellants and the experiences had within its walls, germinated into the poem I wrote in 1982 called “Empty Boxes.”  There was a sadness about the house, especially in the Autumn, that I did not experience at the tool shed.  This sadness affected us narratively and imaginatively, and it became manifest in the sense that there were ‘ghosts’ thereabouts.  A couple of us believed we actually saw a ghost of a woman at The Old House, once upon a time.  She ‘appeared’ to a friend of mine who was circling around the back of the house on one of our ‘explorations.’  He said she was elderly and she was standing in the doorless doorway that opened into the little hallway between the stairwell and what we called the ‘little back room behind the kitchen’—for lack of understanding of its purpose in life.  Another friend with us went to see what had happened when he heard our friend let out a little gasp, and thought he saw a bit of fog or mist spilling out of the doorway.  It was a damp and rainy day, so such a natural phenomenon was not beyond possibility.  But our mutual friend said he saw a ghost, and not a fog or mist.
What is a ghost but a memory of human dwelling?  What do they portend but our own end? _Whatever they actually are.  I have no beliefs, though in my life I have seen two phenomena that meet all the usual the characteristics of a ‘ghost.’
I often met with mentors and friends at The Old House over many years and had great conversations about life, mysticism and spirituality.  Over the course of a decade and a half, as I matured and discovered my poetic vocation, a series of friends watched with me as the house dilapidated; ultimately returning to the Earth.  This reflective watching became manifest in my poetry in the early 1980’s as the theme of “Stages of Decay.”  It fostered reflection on the impossibility of returning to the past, about which I wrote one poem by that name, and another poem and two or three short stories dealing with it.  The decay of the house marked the passing of time for me, and it taught me that the past is ever receding from us.  The past no longer exists.  It is only maintainable through memory; only touchable via the artifacts left behind.  More than anything else in the first three decades of my life, the decay of ‘The Old House’ schooled me in the fact of mortality.  No one ever reclaimed that house, and by the early 1990’s it was entirely collapsed.  When I revisited it in 2005, it was entirely covered with leaf-mulch and fallen branches.  It had collapsed into its interior space – the once-upon-a-time space of human dwelling – its stone foundation barely discoverable amidst the bracken that blanketed it all around.

While ruins are a touchstone of the spirituality and mysticism of Autumn, sometimes, out of ruin, there does arise new life.  The plant world is an icon of this possibility, where rebirth often follows upon death in the turning of the seasons. There can be a resurrection; a reformulation of life and a regeneration of hope and energy and possibility—and this is the second of the narrative themes explored in Heart & Hearth (2009); the reclaiming of home and the rebuilding of an authentic life after great loss.  Symbolically, this process of reclamation can be seen in Spring following Winter after the death of Autumn, but that is the subject for another blog.[iii]




[i] When I first posted this blog, a reader asked about the ‘figurative death’ to which I was referring.  I explained that, in a spiritual and poetic sense, the year begins for me on the day after Winter Solstice (22 December) and that it ends the next December at midnight on Winter’s Solstice.  Birth—Growth—Maturity—Repose and then a settling into a devout anticipation (during November) of a symbolic death and rebirth at the next Winter Solstice.  This is the Wheel of the Year that I follow, year after year.  You cannot be spiritually reborn unless you ‘die’ first.  For me, an earthen spirituality is a spiral journey through the seasons, over and over again, learning from Nature and experiencing your own transformation via metaphors drawn from the seasons.

[ii] Heart and Hearth (AuthorHouse, 2009) is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and at Authorhouse.com]

[iii] See “A Revel Towards Spring” (27 February 2011) and “Resurrection and Rootedness: A Beltaine Blog” (1 May 2011) at this blogspot.