Autumn longing
Autumn’s longing takes me to places I wouldn’t choose, but I go in this season because she takes me there.
It’s that slowing down, an inward-turning feeling this time of the year around late autumn when I feel it most. It’s melancholic but without the heaviness. It’s sorrowful but without the sadness. I know this season well; I think it’s always been my favorite. Late autumn seems to match some aspect of myself that’s often hidden, something I can’t readily access or express in other seasons. It’s wistful, like a deep longing that lingers as an undercurrent.
Recently, longing held my hand and hinted at that undercurrent. She took me to sorrow — my old sorrows that I’m still keeping from decades ago that I forgot. She took me to a world’s collective sorrow I am a part of but cannot seem to grasp as it careens onward. The etymology of sorrow contains the meaning of “care” in some instances. I became quiet and still for days. It’s the longing for depth and release, for what has never happened, and for things to not be happening as they are.
Inspired to make a healing chime for me, I worked in my studio, creating a new one. I needed release from sorrow, the release that comes only in autumn, like a slow falling away.
The fallen ginkgo leaves were everywhere in my neighborhood, their bright yellow fanned leaves dominating the landscape on my walks. I picked up a handful of ginkgo leaves and tucked them into my pocket. Then another handful. Ginkgo is a prehistoric species that has existed for hundreds of millions of years. What sorrows have they seen, I wondered.
They looked like tiny lanterns, lighting the way. I remembered the South Asian and Southeast Asian festivals of light this season – from Diwali in India to Yi Peng in Thailand and Boun Heua Fai in Laos — festivals with candles in small lamps, banana leaf boats, and paper lanterns alighting the earth, the rivers, and skies. And soon, it will be the Winter Solstice here, as darkness transitions to more light in our days. They seem to signify a coming close and a letting go.
Long dotted marks were painted on the leaves in iridescent white. Like when the sky turns cloudy and overcast, and there is moisture amidst the dryness in the air — that kind of shimmery-ness after a misty rain or before a snowfall, surrendering to what is happening.
I started wrapping light indigo silk thread around the ginkgo leaf stems and later the ashen stick around and around. This autumn, last autumn, the one before that, and the ones yet to come. It’s the same. And it’s different every year. It’s cyclical and maybe like a spiral, life taking me around and around, reaching into the past, bringing it to the present, and integrating it forward. My old sorrows from decades ago brought forward, giving me the opening to release the longing for what never happened.
Using the same light indigo silk thread, I made columns from a simple straight hand-stitch designed to pull the wrapped ginkgo leaves through. I was reminded of repeating things, the not-quite-straight and slightly off, and my tendency for meandering. Longing meanders, too, I thought, from the depths to the heights, traversing anywhere. She lingers and is ever fleeting. She is the deep undercurrent.
The handwoven cotton fabric from Laos was hand-dyed using eucalyptus leaves. It was my first attempt at hand dyeing (read more about that in “A kind of alchemy”), and the resulting yellow-butterscotch color was beautiful. For the healing chime, the square fabric swatch felt like the ground, the space where everything was happening. Contained and gently fraying on the edges, where longing landed briefly, creating a ripple in the undercurrent for me to feel.
Autumn’s longing takes me to places I wouldn’t choose, but I go in this season because she takes me there. Everything feels exposed, and I want to hold on before I fall away slowly. The ground underneath fills with fallen leaves, my sorrows, and the world’s sorrows. It carries the longing for another season in its depths, the potential for everything to happen.
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Letting go, letting be
LouLou
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