Lisbon has gone grey this week. I knew it was coming - I left anxiously last week for Spain and made a silent wish that when I returned there'd still be hopeful spurts of sun peeking through the clouds. Alas. Of course it's not that bad, I am famously prone to dramatics around weather that is not completely, unambiguously hot. But still, the autumnal shift has happened and with it, my body has gone a bit wobbly, my mornings are slower than usual, and everything just feels a bit… more shit?
I've never actually been diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, I've never felt the need to pathologise what I know to be true, which is that as summer recedes and winter approaches, I am stuck in a state of perpetual glumness, and my primary objective is to move through it, move around it, live with it. It's never anything I've felt strongly enough about to make a big fuss about, though perhaps the friends who had to endure eight years of me circling the edge of a nervous breakdown every winter in London would beg to differ.
I have a habit, as many of us do, of thinking of myself as in some ways separate from my natural environment. I see the weather as something that happens around me, rather than to me, and there's a part of me that's deeply resistant to the idea that something as basic as how much light I'm getting or what temperature my body is having to adjust to, could be the source of what is spinning my brain the fuck out. I've been reflecting recently on how rooted this notion is in all of us, this stubborn refusal to acknowledge that we are a part of the natural world as much as any other being and just as much subject to its whims, no matter how many impressive structures we build around us or invisible information networks we engage with. It took a few winters in London of exploring everything else that I thought could be wrong in my life - my employment, my love life, the state of the world - before I succumbed to what felt like both the simplest and most complex answer - that I just hadn't seen the sun for a while, that I probably just needed to "touch some grass".
I've been curious recently about what it would look like to swing hard in the other direction, to connect with the natural environment in a more integrated way. I've started trying to conceptualise the natural world around me as a kind of character in my life, something I interact with, that I can be in dialogue with. And for me, at least, it's hard. Jenny Odell in How To Do Nothing talks about intentionally connecting with your bio-sphere (the specific cabal of animals, plants and nature endemic to the area you live in) through making time to learn the names of the beings around you and observe them. And of course everything I've ever read that speaks to indigenous ways of knowing the world (Braiding Sweetgrass, Sand Talk) echoes the same sentiment. I recently worked with someone on a training who is a keen bird watcher and environmentalist and seeing him effortlessly name and interact with the animals and plants around us (we were in an old farmhouse in Catalunya, teeming with wildlife) created in me such a profound sense of awe and jealousy that I promised myself I'd start going on more nature walks.
So this year I am posing myself a gentle challenge, where rather than positioning myself in opposition to the oncoming greyness, I instead try to remain curious about it, what it might be telling me, the conversation it might be starting. I am going to try to approach the browning of the trees with wonder, and see if I can spot any critters I'm not used to seeing. I am going to look into what vegetables and fruit are shifting into season and see what I can magic up with them. And when I wake up and the air feels stale and the world outside is more crisp than I want it to be, I'm going to channel all my seasonal frustration into a question and see if the morning answers back.
Wish me luck - and happy Autumn! (is this a thing people say?)
Thanks for reading! I am finding it really great to be on a writing cadence, and being generous to myself when life is happening and I can't make my made-up deadline (hence no newsletter last week). As always open to feedback and thoughts from you all - and thanks for letting me invade your inbox once a week.
Yay! Loved this. I really enjoy knowing the names of the birds and the trees around me (even in grey London which has very few remaining naturally occurring animals lol) and it makes me a better writer! Tell us about what you learn x