End of summer ritual

I was on the plane back from France.

It was the last day of August.

I realised the long summer was ending and a new season, a new lifestyle, a different set of goals and a new place were about to start.

I need to mark it somehow, I thought to myself.  I wonder how.

Fags and beer! Fags and beer! Myself said back.

Ok, I thought, but maybe there's a better way.

Of bringing something to a close, and creating good seeds for the entering of a new phase.

I settled on burial for closure, and planting for the new phase.

So I started with a candle lit bath, when I got home, in which I sifted through all my memories of the summer like a 3D slide projector with full sound, colour and maybe even smells.

By the end of the bath I was full of the summer and full of good stuff.

I dressed and took a leaf that I had picked from the top of a tall oak tree for Michael. We had six months apart last year and took to writing letters and putting things in them, things like leaves you pick from the top of a tree you're climbing.

So that leaf was a bit precious. It was from a special moment in a special place and it was bound for a special person. And instead I was going to give it as an offering.

I like this practice of other cultures of making offerings, offerings to patcha mama, a gift of some sort when you arrive in the city to get you in favour with the 'gods' of the place, so I'm trying to figure out how to actually do that. I think it counts to give actual things to actual people, but sometimes there's making a symbolic offering to something non-human, something like the earth, something that is part of the bigger aliveness we live with.

So trying not to attract attention to the security men in the large block of flats I lived in, I went downstairs and out into the little garden shrouded in night, with a spoon and my leaf and I think some sage, and myself full of memories and feelings of the summer.

I found me a little bush where I'd be protected from view, and gently dug a little grave for the summer in the soft earth. Then I simply put the leaf in the earth, at once laying the summer to rest and giving a gift of thanks. I laid the soft earth on top, lit a little sage leaf and quietly watched it smoke, feeling the summer gently close.

I went back upstairs and into a warm and contented sleep.

...

I was then homeless for a bit so didn't plant a plant as I'd intended because I couldn't look after it. I didn't do anything, and the next season was ok, but it wasn't really properly kicked off. That's ok.

I really liked doing that.