November

The rather garish pumpkin pictured above was the result of a delightful autumn art event at The Sun in Carshalton, facilitated by local artist, Doug Shaw. Not so much an art class but an hour and a half of discovery and experimentation where we were encouraged to think differently about the process of mark-making and colour. At a long table, we sat down together and used the paints, pens, pencils, paper and board to come up with what turned out to be some very different and unique takes on the seasonal pumpkin theme. All of this and Lucky Saint on tap in the bar below which allowed us to concentrate on the creative process (and drive home safely). The sessions are monthly: I have already booked up for the next one.

I spent time recently at an Arvon writing retreat in Devon. There was no mobile signal in the house and the only Wi-fi was that which was leaking from the small office building in the garden. This seemed bizarre to me as surely writers need to be able to access the internet just as much as they need to find peace and quiet? I think we all spent time standing in the rain in the soggy garden; trying to connect to our loved ones and in some cases, even our publishers.

So who would you text if you were reduced to queuing at a Wi-fi spot in the rain?  I discovered my list is a short one and includes my children, my husband, my sister and my oldest friend. This handful of beloveds holds most of what I want out of life. And if I were to lose any one of them, my life would be incredibly bleak.

And yet. The dying of the light as we approach winter reminds us that everything is finite and we are all eventually going to die. It is the inevitability we all live with from Day One. It is the only certainty we can ever have.

There have been countless ways of approaching this stark fact. It is the underlying reason for much of what we believe. You can believe in an after-life which puts off the unpleasant idea of a future non-existence. You can decide that there is no after-life (and, yes, that is a belief too). You can accept that one cannot know, which just adds another layer of doubt and uncertainty. You can take the Buddhist view that one cannot cling to life. Wear it lightly and live out each moment mindfully. Make the best life you can while you have it. This sounds sensible until you go deeper and discover that reincarnation means that the whole tiresome cycle begins again upon your death so that what you do in this life affects the next. You can put your faith in science and have your earthly remains deep-frozen in the hope that a miracle ‘cure’ for death will be discovered in the next millennium. As long as the freezer doesn’t break down. You can decide that the transmission of your genes through your children is some sort of route to immortality. But if you can’t have or don’t want to have children then that is not an option. There seems to be no comfortable answer.

But now it's November again and the leaves themselves are dying to gold and copper. There are determined wasps on the fallen apples. It seems somewhat late but it doesn’t surprise us as everything has been altered this year. Are we no longer alarmed by the accelerating changes of climate warming? Has late-onset winter become another ‘new normal’?

I believe that watching the alteration in the trees still gives us a reassuring pattern. We make sense of our lives by discerning patterns. In our art, music, writing, architecture and science; in our relationships and our dreams, we take the existing frequencies and elements and try to pattern them out of chaos. Sometimes we deliberately induce chaos, but that is also at our command. In this way, we achieve some vestige of control: some kind of immortality. The pattern and the knowledge of how to make the pattern can be passed on and on between ourselves and forward to future generations. And this may be the only thing that will survive our death.