Mourning Season
Late summer has always felt melancholy to me. As a kid of course, it was about the end of freedom, the end of long days running around wild and unmonitored in nature, and returning to sterile classrooms and cruel children. But it’s more…the end of the growing season, plants beginning to transition to their next stage in the cycle of life and death. Birds beginning to to plan their journey southward. Days shortening. Darkness reaching to us, drawing us nearer.
As an adult, I’ve accepted my personal inclination towards melancholia, and greet the changes differently. Contrast and change are what allows us to appreciate things, after all.
I’ve been learning more about the Jewish calendar of the year, mostly through Rabbis Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg’s wonderful book, For Times Such As These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year. Our ancestors set aside this time of the year for mourning, reckoning, taking stock of the past year, and making amends to prepare for the new year. Many Jewish holidays are very connected to harvest cycles, earth cycles, so it makes perfect sense to me that it is this time that is meant for mourning.
Short post this week! I’m leaving you with a poem I wrote a couple years ago.
If anyone is in Richmond, VA tonight, you can catch me vending my wares (zines, linocut prints, a new linocut card for the autumn solstice!, pasties, and whatever the heck else is in my bag) at the Moon Market for First Fridays at Gallery 5! Gallery 5’s exhibit this month features work from artists of the Middle East diaspora. Street fair is from 5-10pm: vendors, food, and performances.
You can tell the first signs of fall
in the middle of August
if you pay close enough attention.
A certain scent in the air—
The crickets begin to overtake the cicadas—
A tingle on your skin—
The nostalgia and excitement of a change to come
distilling into a hypnotic aroma.