The snow has come early this year—earlier than I can remember it in the twenty years I’ve lived here. The mountains went from a brief dusting that we typically will watch edge further down the mountainside each week until Halloween, when real snow most often comes and stays. Instead, the mountains are pure white as of two weeks ago. The contrast with the goldening leaves of the birches is a different scene to take in—both glowingly alive with the brightness and absence of color.
Around the same time, a pair of swans appeared on our neighborhood pond, as if bringing the white of the mountains down to ground level, resting on the water before they head further south. White in the background, yellow in the foreground, white-feathered swans inbetween.
And then, within a week, they were gone. I watched them one afternoon as I walked my dog, lifting slowly off the water, their bodies angled at what seemed a perfect 45-degree angle headed skyward. They have not returned and will not until next year, when they again head north, and perhaps, if we’re lucky, on their way back south.
Of course I wasn’t the only one to notice the swans moving through. The Anchorage news is nothing if not a whiplash of horror and worry, alongside occasional reports of the natural world, juxtaposed in stacked blocks online. The headlines for September 28 included the following: Alaska reports 10 COVID-19 deaths and just over 700 new cases Tuesday; Anchorage’s public health manager resigns as city faces worst COVID-19 surge of the pandemic; Man charged with murder in death of woman on St. Paul Island; Swans pause in Anchorage on their way south for winter; Ground search suspended for hiker missing…
I read the stream of subjects and drew a breath, pausing to think about the paired swans in our neighborhood, marveling again at a world of violence and beauty coexisting.
The chaos of Alaska is something that I've never been able to settle into. It’s the whiplash (a word I’m repeating but I can’t think of another word that so accurately sums up the conundrum, with its soft wh- and -sh, broken by the consonant hit of the -p…) that I find continually unsettling—the beauty/indifference, the ugliness/community, the dark/light extremes that you are compelled to confront and live alongside of in this place. Driving my son to school one morning that same week, we saw a woman wandering alongside the busy traffic clearly disoriented from the evening before—and after thankfully seeing her walk on in relative safety, then turned the corner to be confronted with multiple mountains, white and smoothed that somehow seem to offer a comfort that belies the cold.
Sometimes it feels like fall is the truest season of Alaska—where the darkness returns and begins to eke into the days, the cold startles and takes up space sooner than you remember. Alaska never seems quite authentic in summer. Alaska to me feels like a place of melancholy, and the fall suits it best—the beauty of the leaves changing and the birds migrating— yet their absence means we can now, again, more clearly see a built environment of 1980s oil boom and decay for the next six months. And know that the cold and darkness is growing by leaps each day, towards the disorienting weight of months when you cannot tell whether it is morning or night.
The fall also lasts a bit longer than the spring here (which is over in a week after a month and a half of melt, gravel, and blackened composting leaves from the previous fall emerging out of the melted snow)—and it’s that inbetweenness of it—that maybe one extra week that almost rounds out a month—that gives enough space to contemplate the change of seasons, a little more room to adapt and prepare.
Needless to say, I’m feeling the inbetween of now. The week of the swans reminded me of it, of that liminal space between change, transition—between day and night, between summer and fall, fall and winter, between earth and water, water and air, awake and sleep. Of places that I’ve been that I am no longer. Of leaving and return.
As I was thinking and reading about liminal spaces I came across The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a website that is soon to be a book, full of definitions of feelings and emotions that live in the liminal space between language and feeling. Where one writer has endeavored to fill in the blanks of the English language, which is not always the most nuanced when it comes to conveying a feeling.
I came across a word on the first page that I instantly knew I needed in my vocabulary:
austice: n. a wistful omen of the first sign of autumn—a subtle coolness in the shadows, a rustling of dead leaves abandoned on the sidewalk, or a long skein of geese sweeping over your head like the second hand of a clock.
So precise and real that definition! The first skein of geese, like a haloed net hovering above, heading south (without me!) in August always feels like a shadow much wider than the shape of their bodies. And, replace swan with geese, and I’d say austice is about exactly the word for what I’m feeling and what we might all need—that shadowy liminal space between things on the verge of change—to be reminded of the pause between, as we watch animals and trees responding to change, while we continue along in chronos time—of having to go on with a world’s routines that are intent on pretending an obliviousness to what is happening around us. Of having to stay rooted when you wish to migrate and leave for other places. Of staying in place and waiting for an unsure arrival.
The ancient Celts were familiar with liminality. Halloween is derived from the Celtic half-year festival of harvest, Samhain—the day the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grows thin. I’ve always loved that description, of an insouciant belief in the possibility in the world beyond our own, of the intervention of fairies, spirits, and ancestors, both spooky and benevolent but never knowing which for sure. The mystery of it allowed to remain veiled, if thin.
In Celtic oral history and later literature, inhabitants of the otherworld who wish to enter the terrestrial world—for what reason is unclear—take on the shape of a swan and “generally travel in pairs linked by a gold or silver chain.” Celtic art will also sometimes depict a pair of swans on either side of a sunboat, which they steer on their voyage across the celestial ocean. It is thought that since swans come from and return to the North, they reflected higher, even angelic, forms of being “in the course of liberation and return to the Almighty Principle” (from the Dictionary of Symbols).
I like to think of those spirits moving between worlds, as I watched the pair of swans move from pond to sky. That perhaps in their migration we are seeing a glimpse of the returning spirits from another world, as the veil between worlds is thinning. As the trees disrobe to stand bare in the approach of winter, as the birds move on, chased by the cold. That migration is a part of that liminal, past-present-future space. Of appearances and departures, of loss and return.
And that what can appear to us in the inbetween—in between the whiplash of Alaska, or of living in a world that is both kind and devastatingly cruel—perhaps the liminal, inbetween is where meaning lives.
Dear Freya, thanks for the opportunity to say some words around your eliciting reflections and writings.
I have never been to Alaska, I imagine the country in the "liminal" space between sky and earth, rich in open spaces and communities living places at a great distance from the next. In this sense I want to think it a magic place where natural setting becomes naturally magic, as it is: white mountains, trees, water, animals, and ..imagination! What beyond the border of Alaska? are swans hidden in a remote world to wait for Spring? no, obviously, however I like the myth of these lands and the solitude of living "FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD" typically of these wide green lands ,is it a childish idea of the country? all right, it is what geography, pictures give me..
But i 'd like to focus on a sentence which I find very close to my attitude, not only,to many artists' too..Fall is more true than aridity and blinding light of the sun brightening the hot days for months in Summer..As I live in a mediterrenean country,north Italy, probably I feel the question in a stronger way, lots of people like muggy days when going out for a walk is an activity for early morning or late evening!..I like swimming, water and sun, but normal sunny hours, with a temperture which permits me to enjoy life , not the Hell!
Think about this, in Fall Nature seems to say ..stop please, now I need to have e break, to have a rest , everything appears like real as it should be, you can perceive trees in their colourful look, the water seems to be more clear and the mountains brown green or white are mountains, people get less excited with the time of vacation, now in their expectation for the season to come and a world not filtered by the veil of too much light which makes things false, not natural - in Autumn the light-like movie of the summer thrown over us becomes sober, quiet, and the need to be with ourselves is typically autumnal and wintry , we need to live this state and reflect, to look inside our consciousness and discover something hidden which comes up to our mind as a sort of epiphany, such is the thoughtful mood in this stuning season!
I write, I need to write, to picture my feelings,memories, experiences, never invented on the paper, music! and music becomes important, it mirrors the sound of the wind though he trees and the scent of the air which feels colder, lounge jazz, jazz, autumn leaves in jazz..
MY best songs? In Autumn and Winter, Sting affirms, How could I write and think and create in the long ,hot ,so extremely clear days in summer?.I feel disoriented and distract, that is the reason why in Summer I need holidays, beaches and entertainment..
Climate has changed, the planet is going to face great natural revolutions, but Man keeps memories of the seasons as they were in the past, it's a biological memory, which will house into Human beings forever, as it is for many aspects of our species, unaware we will remember !
there a chaos, I do know..nothing is well defined, we are living a transitional period, animals , too, can't recognize the direction to the north o south?, do permit me, Should I stay or should I go?
In the park near my place, there is a "serpentine" with a Palladian Temple on the top of a little hill, and statues , beneath in the crystalline water swans and ducks and geese live.
Once a time, when I was child, our teacher used to take the class to "Querini Park", to see trees flowers, and swans, I remember she would repeat "now, they are going to migrate and will return in Spring.."I went this morn to the park for a walk, swans geese and ducks were behind a bush..still, watching and protecting their shelters, on the other side it's October, 23 degrees in the morning , 28 in the afternoon..is it normal? no, It terrifies me! and makes me feel another person, anxious and not in the right place! My Octobers were cooler, and it was stunning to change our way of thinking ,life even dresses, and breath a new mood! I didn 't see the ducks this morning..
I can understand the swans in the pond, but the ducks??? no, the were in their cache, migrated????hmm, why? it' s 28 degrees..however the question is always and metaphorically the same, -do not quote me on this - please!:
damn.."Where do the ducks go in the winter?"(Catcher in the Rye)
love Alessandra..
P.P., as to the Celts I can talk with you in the following, promise.