To Autumn, a favourite poem by John Keats (1795-1821), has been on the tip of my tongue all week, only coming to full expression last evening when I conducted a Celtic Woman soiree by moonlight, meeting and mingling with the delightful group of women who made their way by highway and byway to a picturesque hilltop location on the outskirts of Newmarket. A kaleidescope of vibrant, shifting colours, reflective of every golden brush stroke of the evening sun, prepared a mood of joyful expectation in one and all, a veil of enchantment seeming to linger over earth and sky as introductions were made. Then softly dying daylight gave way to a burst of crimson red and turquoise blue, shot through with brilliant pinks and orange. Huddling around a blazing firepit as darkness fell, we watched in awe until the light show was no more. Our attention then found a new wonder in the natural soundscape in which we seemed imbedded, a raucous surge of Canada geese above our heads was underscored by a monotonous chorus of crickets, accompanied by croaks and twitters and the random scurry of small animals in the grass. One woman became aware of the ghostly presence of an owl, in a thicket of leaves above her head, that vanished from sight before the rest of us had turned to look. Where are the songs of Spring? Keats asked in the last verse of the poem I then recited, with this rejoinder: Think not of them! Thou hast thy music too!
I gave thanks for the few flowers that linger in my garden because of the poet’s reference to the purpose of our maturing sun in conspiring with the spirit of the season:
…..to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammmy cells.
Bees have been on my mind of late. A dear friend who lives in the south of France recently sent me a jar of lavendar honey that is surely worth its weight in gold. Every precious spoonful awakens memories of lavendar fields in full bloom. Honey reigns supreme among the range of uses the French have conjured up for the sturdy flower that grows in such profusion during the months of July and August in a part of France familiar to me and highlighted in my book (see chapter 13).
Albert Einstein predicted that human life would come to an end in its present form if the honey bee became extant. He regarded the bees work in pollinating essential crops as vital to our earthly survival. There has been an alarming collapse of bee colonies in the US, in Ireland, England and other countries of late. I like to think that the bees of Provence are spared the standard travel of 55,000 miles in order to draw nectar from the some two million flowers needed for the production of a single pound of honey. Every day must constitute a veritable ‘field day’ for countless worker bees in that blessed region!
What, you might ask, does this have to do with books? Everything, if Rainer Maria Rilke is anyone to go by. He had his own poetic harvest in mind when he wrote: We are the bees of the invisible. We frantically plunder the visible of its honey, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible. For what is the honey of life but the meaning we glean from its joys and sorrows. The more engaged we are in our relationship to one another, to the natural world and to our given tasks, the more we gather the nectar of experience and transform it inside our invisible hearts into spiritual substance. To be an adult implies having the freedom to choose between conflicting thoughts by drawing on the capacity of discernment we have honed (as in ‘honey’), an intuitive faculty that relies on imagination and inspiration, the spiritual elements of being on which every writer depends.
