by Catherine Raetzo
I remember this exercise at Callanish Writes. What is your season right now? Are you in spring or summer or fall or winter? It was the third week of May, and I was only a month or so past my second cancer surgery. I had no idea if it was over or if there was more to come.
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Before discovering that I had a sarcoma growing in my upper leg, I recall that I was a little depressed. Maybe more than a little. There were moments when I wasn’t entirely sure whether I wanted to live or die because living seemed so hard. There is nothing like cancer to pull you up short and realise how very much you want to be alive, how much you are willing to brave in order to win one more moment. I can see in this writing the still unsettled whirl, like fallen leaves caught up in a brisk wind, of all the emotions and all the reassessments and all the willingness to sit with whatever blew through me to see where I really was, and to be there.
My Season Now
autumn topple collapse drift
drop leaves brittle crunch
red orange dark-green dark-brown
wet black ooze wait silence
Fall. That is where I feel I am. Instant censor: mustn’t go to gloom. Must encourage the troops. Mustn’t let our side down with despair. But I’m not in despair. Just gloomy. Like fall.
Fall, always the safe, slow enwrapping of the season—like a shawl drawn gradually round myself. Summer, lively and dappled green, demands great activity. Spring, wet and fragile with promise, encourages hope and care. Only winter slows to a pace where gazing out the window is the practical thing, and it is autumn which midwifes me there.
Fall is a time of beginnings. A fresh semester of school, new horizons, new timetable, new smells, and new social jostling, not yet settled down to the bottom of the box.
And fall is the time of endings. Spring verdure, drawn and hardened over summer, collapses downward now, fibrous and woody, then is softened by fall’s wet, slowly hardened by its chill, to reach next spring a paste of dormant energy, to feed the soil anew.
Can I really be in autumn’s quiescence or am I full bore into the absolute zero of ultimate winter, or am I burbling under the ice with the first thoughts of spring, not yet aware?
Catherine Raetzo was told about Callanish at her first Buddhist retreat (winter 2011-2012) and was profoundly lucky (and grateful) to be able to go with them to Brew Creek on retreat, before undergoing treatment for her sarcoma. The people of Callanish, their values and their practices have been a precious part of her life ever since.