Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…
-Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
Autumn has swept itself through the land, and, as with every year, I have found myself yearning for the transition to slow itself down, for the change of colors to last just a little bit longer. Fast and fleeting as it always is, the signs of winter have already arrived. Leaves of golden yellows, reds, and oranges quickly blanketed with an unexpected fall of snow, only later to be pulled from the stillness by gale force winds and driving rain. But the storm passed as every storm does. Snow has fallen and melted, fallen and melted. The cold, however, has arrived to stay. Gray clouds cover the sky with hints of blue between, illuminating trees with branches stripped bare. Leaves once embellished the landscape with shocks of sporadic color, blazing proudly through the thickening dusk, providing light and warmth to the quickly shortening days. But there are few clingers on, and these leaves are now a dry, crinkling brown. Still beautiful, but different. It feels more like winter than autumn these days, though the season is still here by rights. And there are some of us who forever carry autumn in our hearts.
It always surprises me when I meet someone who doesn’t love the fall. The crisp, cold air, the smell of crackling bonfires, or when I was a child, the unmistakable scent of burning leaves. Lighting cozy scented candles, cozying up in sweaters, sipping tea and lattes. Getting my hands upon every spooky book, podcast, movie, tv show and audiobook I possibly can, wrapping myself within a crimson cloak of tales; tales of ghosts, ghouls, witches, Gothic fairy tales. Long walks to take in the ever-changing colors while listening to dark, classical strings and witchy, melancholic melodies, leaves crunching underfoot. All of it feels holy to me, sacred in a way no other season can. Where some see impending darkness, I witness heightened senses, a rousing wakefulness that can only happen in the dark, or beneath clouded skies.
The trees teach us to burn our brightest before we are stripped to the bone. To shed all of our beliefs and mis-beliefs that we have so colorfully cloaked ourselves in with so much pride, and to stand naked, exposed. Skeletal. As with the trees, we look down around us and see our colors pooling at our feet- our accomplishments, our dreams fulfilled, so many beautiful memories of moments that passed too quickly, regardless of how hard we tried to hold on. So much of what we call our essence is stripped from us in beautiful swirls of golden sepia, rich mahogany, blazing ember, blood-red vermilion. Colors of us, yet no longer a part of us, to be carried off in scattering winds.
It’s a scary thing, this barrenness. It can be hard to look upon the stark beauty of it all. We see who were were and who we have now become, and we desperately want to gather our leaves back up, frantically paste them back on by any means necessary, revert to the versions of ourselves that we were only a season or two before. Without our leaves we feel incomplete. We are left too fragile, too naked and raw. Unmasked.
The leaves that gather around our feet serve as a reflecting pool, mirroring back to us not only who we once were but the lives of others near to us, leaves and colors intermingling and entwining. Now it is up to us to decide what to gather back within ourselves for coming seasons, what to re-ingest, what to incubate and prepare for birth in spring. Yet we must also decide what to cast to the blackness of night and banish forever. We shed not only our light but the weight of our darkness too. Autumn allows for opportunity to cast away the shame of poor decisions, the aching regret of mistakes incapable of erasure. The confidence we lost, the dreams that were left to die abandoned, unnourished.
So I have asked myself each day as I watch the leaves fall, as I watch this season of my life turn over, as I prepare myself to stand naked and exposed and bare, facing the long, dark, winter months to come… What will I be banishing into the darkness? What will I cast away?
There’s a time well-known to all of us who believe in ghosts and magic, in the paranormal, in life beyond death. The Witching Hour is the time between 3 and 4am, the time when our darkest thoughts come to gather and taunt us with their lies, their truths. It’s the time when the whole world seems to sleep soundly around us, unable or unwilling to save us from the evil that creeps through the cracks beneath our door frames, sneaking silently across the floor, stealing itself beneath our bedcovers, and seeping itself into our psyches. One could say the same for the time between the 3rd and 4th seasons. We count down our days of light until the veil between the light and the dark, the living and the dead, is at its thinnest. Until the souls we have lost, the dreams we have lost, come rapping at our door, bidden or unbidden, reminding us they were never truly dead, never fully buried.
This witching hour has been no stranger to me, driving me awake on countless nights with a pounding heart. Fears that lurk regardless of the season. Insecurities that cut to the bone. Doubts that overtake me like a fog, enveloping and consuming until only my weakest aspects remain in my mind. Numbness and apathy that seeps in like a poison and paralyzes me into states of inaction and malaise. There’s a reason so many of us drown ourselves in tales of horror this season. It is not only to entertain, but to distract. Immersing ourselves in fictional fears frees us, if only temporarily, from the reality of our own.
Some say, though, that as woman, we are all witches. Generations of our ancestors burned at the stake, drowned, tortured, ostracized and cast out simply for their knowledge, their intuition, their connection with the earth, with the spirit world, with themselves. Women who paid for crimes they never committed, received punishments they never deserved, murdered out of fear, out of ignorance, out of a jealousy of a power that others would never possess. Their magic was not lost. It has seeped into the blood of generation after generation, spread through artery and tissue, reproduced in cell upon cell. We, as the feminine, hold this magic in our veins, and if this is true, this hour is ours.
Autumn, then, is a reminder of this power, a call to come back into ourselves. Through words of enchantment and spells of magic, through potions brewed and tinctures concocted, we can face the impending darkness head on, banishing our own demons, destroying versions of our world that cast a ghostly pallor on the brighter aspects of life. There is much that I will gladly cast into the darkness- all the myths about myself that I have come to believe, the stories I’ve adopted that have directed my life down paths better left to the past. Ownership over my life that I have freely lent to others’ control.
Or maybe I speak too soon. Perhaps this idea of banishment itself is a myth. Perhaps there is no such thing. Exorcism is an oddly reassuring thought, knowing we hold the power to keep the shadows at bay. Maybe it’s truer to say that we must simply live in balance with the darkness around us, the darkness inside of us. Poe’s raven kept watch atop his mantle for time everlasting, taunting with the words of ‘Nevermore’, with wings to fly and no desire to use them.* The raven to Poe symbolized an all-encompassing grief, a dark presence that never looked away, that never gave way to light, that slowly ate through soul and spirit. We all have a raven sitting on our mantel, mocking us, engulfing us, reminding us of our blackness. Maybe salvation lies in looking this darkness straight in the eye- knowing it, learning it, coming to terms with its ceaseless presence. Knowing there will always be a hole in our heart that can never be filled again, seeing those scars that forever remind us of our bleakest days, accepting the memories that haunt us when we least expect. But the raven, too, is a living being, shedding and transforming just like the rest of us. Its change is inevitable. In its molting, its feathers fall, too, like the leaves of a tree, beautiful in their darkness and grief, iridescent and shining like tears. For grief, we all know, is always born of love.
If we are honest with ourselves, there never really is an escape from blackness. It comes regardless of an invite. So we light candles, we sing songs, we adorn ourselves in festive colors, we distract, and, hopefully, we learn to make peace. Energy cast away only comes back to us in new forms, and what we bury never stays below the surface for long. If Poe can teach us one thing, it is that. And so here I am, candles burning, the light in the sky slowly fading, waiting for the darkness to arrive.
I’ve written these words slowly, haltingly, over a course of weeks. They were first borne upon the page during the height of autumn splendor, wild ideas of reds and golds hitting me amidst Covid-induced brain fog and fevered hallucinatory ramblings. With the fatigue of the illness still lingering and long days of post-work exhaustion, my words, my meanings, the story I first set out to tell has transformed itself into something completely new, so different than what I had expected, instead filled with small insights gathered in bits and spurts throughout the days. I am and will always be walking that ever-winding path, leading me to places unintended and unexpected. It’s full winter where I am now, and the change of season has quite literally materialized alongside my words, the transformation happening all these days without my conscious awareness. Could any reality be truer? Change is inevitable, and our only choice is to adapt.
I’ve resisted hard and fast as always. Tried to control the uncontrollable, to keep the unstoppable seasons from changing at their own pace. But I feel ready now. Ready to trade my fiery leaves for vast white and icy blue. Ready to embrace the winter chill. Ready to address and come to terms with darkness.
Only, I don’t feel so cold. And I don’t feel exposed. It seems I had forgotten one simple thing.
Like a bolt of lightning, the thought flashed through my mind a few nights ago, only to have its truth presented to me in a dazzling radiance yesterday evening. As my partner and I left the noise, the endless streams of people, the light-pollution, the general overwhelm I so often feel of Oslo behind, as we drove the hour north to a much-needed and well-earned solitary escape, as I turned off the main road and the headlights cut through deep darkness… thousands upon thousands of glittering diamonds sparkled back. Snow. Shining like a sea of twinkling stars, surrounding us on every side. Living in the city, it’s easy to forget that magical places like this are real. It’s easy to forget that nature adorns in all seasons.
As Clarissa Pinkola Estes has stated, “I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.”** But this adornment given by nature is not just reserved for the flowering of spring, the sun-kissed summer, or the rainbow palette of autumn leaves. The image of H. C. Anderson’s Snow Queen comes to mind, harsh and cold but beautiful in her robes and jewelry of glittering ice crystals.***
The winter may leave us stripped, bare, skeletal, but in this state is a weightlessness, a lightness, a freedom in being the rawest, truest forms of ourselves. And just as the autumn leaves change, fall, transform, so too will this state. Soon enough, we will be rewarded for our bravery, our steadfastness. Nature will always blanket us anew. The snow will make us sparkle.
*Poe, Edgar Allan, et al. The Raven . New York: Harper & Brothers, 1884.
**Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. First edition. New York, Ballantine Books, 1992.
***Andersen, H. C. 1805-1875. The Snow Queen. New York : London, Macmillan, 1844.
A Mermaid Out of Water 