Athrú - On the Cusp of a New Season
“August Rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”
We are on the cusp of a new season.
Sylvia Plath beautifully describes our feelings when we are on the threshold of change. "The odd uneven time." It is a beautiful description of the felt sense of liminal threshold times in our lives. The word liminal comes from the word limin, which means “threshold” in Latin. Threshold is the separating of one space from another.
We are on the threshold of a new season. The natural world around us is still full and ripe, yet we feel a change is coming. The trees are getting ready to lose their leaves again, and vegetation will begin to change colour and die away. We feel this deeply in our bodies, too. When we are on the threshold of change, there is beauty in it, yet there is a sense of loss and sadness. Sometimes, we might notice a resistance in ourselves, a “not ready yet” feeling. We feel and see the beauty of this new season, and there is melancholy, too, for what has passed.
Melancholy is not a word we hear much these days. When we look up the definition in the dictionary, it speaks to a feeling of “pensive sadness”. The philosopher Alain de Botton wrote beautifully about melancholy, linking melancholy pain with wisdom and beauty. He described how melancholy connects us to the human condition and how inherent feelings of sadness sit alongside the beauty of life’s ebb and flow. We can often feel alone with these feelings, yet they are universal. The human condition is the ebb and flow of life in constant change and transition. These are emotions inherent in transformation, change, and growth. The "odd, uneven time."
The Lost Heifer
As I write this, I also remember a poem by the Irish Poet Austin Clarke (1896-1974) called “The Lost Heifer”. I have always loved this poem as it evokes a real sense of melancholy, a longing for something irretrievably lost. It was voted the Irish Times top 100 favorite Irish poems.
This poem was published in 1936 and is written, as Clarke said, "In the mode of the Jacobite songs." There was a tradition in Ireland where the Old Irish poets personified Ireland in their poems as a woman, the heifer, or ‘silk of the kime’—secret names used by the Jacobite poets for Ireland.
The poem's heifer represents a vision of Ireland, obscured for a moment by mist and rain.
The poem was written during the Irish Civil War, and the poet felt that national identity was undergoing an eclipse. There was a significant change in Ireland at the time, and the poem evokes a sense of sadness and melancholy at this lost heifer (or lost Ireland) that was there but temporarily obscured by the mist and not yet reachable.
Nature and life are forever transforming and changing. We go through periods of mist and feeling lost and emerge into the new transformation after a period of sadness and confusion. When we can understand that, when we can understand these feelings that arise within us and give them meaning in the context of our lives, it supports us at these crossings and thresholds in our own lives.
Understanding these emotions as universally felt feelings helps us emerge from the mist. If we can support ourselves through them, we can trust what is coming as we step into the new changes, landscape, and season.
“And her voice coming softly over the meadows
Was the mist becoming rain”
The Lost Heifer
by Austin Clarke
When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind,
I thought of the last honey by the water
That no hive can find.
Brightness was drenching through the branches
When she wandered again,
Turning silver out of dark grasses
Where the skylark had lain,
And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.
Athrú
The Irish Word for “Change.”
When we encounter deep changes in our lives, we enter a place of transition. These are liminal threshold times. They can be painful, frightening, dark, and bewildering.
We often feel we have no compass, rudder, or anchor. We are on a threshold. It may be overwhelming at times, and finding our ground in it is often hard, at least at first.
In mythology, it is described as a descent—a descent down to the depths of loss. A descent is a death in ways, of aspects of an old self that need to die away in order for a rebirthing of a new aspect of ourselves to come in. These liminal times are often when new aspects of our personality are about to be revealed to us.
Through that darkness, in that descent, we come to know our authentic selves. We find the aspects of ourselves that were exiled in the endeavour to fit in.
Nature teaches us every year, with every changing season, the wisdom of letting go into the transitions and finding the inherent beauty there.
Focail Gaeilge | ‘Irish Words’
In this series, I share words in Gaeilge (Irish) and explore these words through a Depth Psychology lens, allowing us to begin exploring our inner world— our psyche, and deepen our understanding of our place in the world around us. When we embrace our native language or become curious about the languages from our ancestral roots, we can embrace our sense of place, our speech, our imagination, our psyche, and the song of the soul...
References: Austin Clarke (2008) Collected poems. Carcanet Press Ltd. Painting by George Inness (1825-1894)