Summer-Autumn

Goodbye August, Hello September.

Mari Andrew wrote 'The hardest part about summer for me is the relentless length: of days, of nights, of weeks. [...] But August is short. August is a three-week foreign love affair that you can't bring back home. August is a beautiful person who just got off the subway, or a tomato whose prime you may miss by a couple of hours. August is a sunset, a Sunday, the last hour of the best party.'

Each day passing brings me closer to saying goodbye to what has been four years of learning and growing, falling in love, falling off bicycles, losing things, losing people, breaking things, getting stronger, and weaker, and stronger, and weaker, and knowing both are part of life's ebb and flow. It has been a very good party.

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This month I read Gilead, and now am reading Mary Oliver's essays, lent to me by Lucy Boddington after I went to visit her one day in her lovely house, where we went on a walk and made Fimo clay objects and tried vegan magnums and she introduced me to the magical voice of Lianne La Havas. On that walk we waded into a stream, and saw a horse being washed (horses, it turns out, use tresemme shampoo too) by a bridge, and Kerry picked the very ripest blackberries off the hedgerows to be eaten there and then.

Gilead is a fictional autobiography written by Reverend John Ames, who is dying, to his son. It reminded me in ways of When Breath becomes Air, with all the tenderness of someone who is leaving the world and therefore has so much to say and also has the wisdom not to cling to what cannot be possessed. In one of my favourite passages, John Ames ends by telling his son, 'This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.'

If these were my last days, my actual last days, I wouldn't be sad about it. I've been trying to balance thesis writing with a deep appreciation for and attention to this interesting world around me. Blackberry picking is meditative, as is listening to Elgar's cello concerto at the proms. Different types of meditative, but great.

Today I noticed a leaf, green inside and framed by brilliant orange, like the amber sun setting in Highgate woods.

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And yet, I am sad about leaving.

I had a dream a few nights ago, which woke me up weeping. In the dream I saw grandma, walking slowly with her stick towards a cluster of sun dappled trees.

'Where are you going, grandma?'

'I am looking for four years'

Let me look with you, let me walk with you. To feel you. To hold you.

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Where have these four years gone? They have been eaten away by multiple hands dipping bread into hummus, danced away in ceilidhs, written away at all hours on essays from the trivial to the transcendental, whiled away lying in fields, whispered away in the dark, cried away in movie theaters and under the solitary cover of sheets and laughed away without fear of the future.

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Queen Elizabeth I was meant to have said one of two things as her last words: 'All my possessions for one moment of time' or 'I count this as the glory of my crown: that I have ruled with your loves.' Such different senses to an ending, and I would choose the latter.

I think I've come to realise a little better what Paul meant when he said 'to live is Christ, to die is gain'. I have felt the joy of living this past month, but also the felt longing for heaven as never before as I read and think about that place of no injustice, utter peace, and perfect relationship with God. So time is not what I crave really. What I hope, is to have lived with love - and to keep doing so.