I think the swifts have left. Once again it’s impossible to know when exactly this happened, if it was on a particular day or across a week or two, and it feels as though one moment the skies were full of their gentle crescent screams and the next moment—gone. After I’d become aware of this new strand of silence I paid particular attention to the skies whenever walking through town, trying to see if any of them were still swirling effortlessly through the insects up there and waiting for their own this-feels-right time to turn on a dark wing and leave.
It wasn’t possible to locate a single one, and though there are still swallows and martins swooping low through the rooftops the absence of the swifts cannot help but mean that the season is turning itself towards autumn. If the swifts have left, the leaves will be following soon enough, and driving back from Edinburgh yesterday I even noticed a small strand of roadside trees already looking half-rusted in colour.
Someone said to me this morning that this type of weather—warmish, a very slight drizzle of rain, some intermittent brightness from the sun but also looming deep grey clouds over the hills—was their favourite, as it was warm enough to go outside and do things but gloomy and damp enough that staying indoors seemed an equally valid way to spend their hours. I’ve thought about this since returning to the house and beginning an assortment of desk work and household tasks, wondering if it would be useful or interesting to have some sort of collected language of weather we could refer to or speak about—so many words slipped into languages usually not our own that reference and relate to emotions or happenings contained within the natural systems of the planet.
Like the Innu-aimun language spoken by Innu in Newfoundland, Labrador, and Quebec in Eastern Canada, which holds the words amipushu, ‘quiet water surface’, and uashtessiu, ‘the trees are changing colour’.
If we can’t speak about these things, how exactly will we know to protect it all?
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
A mock-up of the illustration for the next (winter) issue of my Orion column, a snip of which is below:
“I would like for us to feel more astonishment, because it seems we are all becoming relatively or increasingly numb to it, or at least unable to recognise it very well, or whatever it is that means people don’t notice snails.”
I am personally unapologetic in my noticing of snails, and similarly unapologetic for the tiny, quiet wails of sadness and/or distress I must let out each and every time I notice a dead creature or bird on a roadside—how many people do not notice, or how many do notice but don’t care to slow down, feeling that their arrival time is more significant than allowing a slowing and a few extra seconds to ensure the continuation of a smaller life.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
A short 16mm film, “Non -”, from some years back, shot within the Australian landscape, a result of film-maker Jack Birtles and choreographer Cassandra Kowitz. Stills from the film are beautiful in and of themselves too:
“All I knew was that I had several faces, all of them hidden, and multiple longings and couldn’t tell which was true.”
“We were our own magic circle in the midst of all this, but I closed my eyes.”
— Joan Barfoot, Dancing in the Dark
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