October Skies

glimpsing the intricate creativity of nature

Autumn is here, bringing with it the golden light of late afternoons, the scent of woodsmoke from the allotments behind our garden, the feeling that something is both ending and beginning. As the days grow shorter and the nights turn crisp, its wild magic unfurls, placing me under its spell in prelude to the close of another year.

I step outside and October whispers to me. I feel its cool breath brush my cheek and catch stray strands of my hair. The air is lighter, somehow and I find myself breathing deeper, steadier, as if the season itself is coaxing me to slow down.

I walk the familiar path into the woods. The crunch of fallen leaves beneath my feet and the scent of earth after rain pull me deeper into October's embrace, where every breath feels like a small act of renewal.

The quiet of early evening settles a gentle cloak of calm around us. Unbidden, my subconscious watches for glimpses of the intricate creativity of nature, longing to find and immortalise it in my camera roll. What began years ago as a practice to capture drawing references to facilitate one kind of art, has grown into an art form that now I claim in its own right.

I've finally let go of the belief that my creativity needs to fit within the constraints of the label ‘illustrator’, to which I had bound myself. Now, I see my photography and all my other creative adventures as art that I can claim as my own, without apology, justification or explanation.

Leaves that are steadfastly green through long days of summer ignite into a kaleidoscope of reds and golds, set aflame as the days shorten and the temperature drops. The production of chlorophyl that keeps the leaves green throughout the summer slows down and eventually stops and the vivid pigments hidden within the leaves appear in a riot of autumnal colours. Perhaps they too, learn the same lesson each year that it has taken me more than half a lifetime to learn. Creativity has never been limited to a single form inside any of us; it has always held the potential to express itself in a riot of different ways.

My subconscious search is rewarded by the abundance of fungi that I find. Amid the fallen leaves and the brambles and ivy, the fly agaric have appeared as if by magic, their red caps dotted with white, otherworldly and impossibly perfect. Every time I find them here, returning at this time of year, I can't help but marvel. If they exist, these small wonders sprung from soil, as they surely do, then perhaps the faeries and goblins do too, hiding just out of sight beneath the leaves.

There is nothing of beauty that we have created that nature did not create before us. They could not be more perfect, had I wished them into existence.

Each October, as the leaves blaze and fall and the fungi spread their delicate caps like emergent inspiration, I am reminded that time moves like the cycle of creativity, circling back on itself, carrying with it the echoes of all the Octobers I’ve known before.

And here, to delight you, is the very first illustrated poem that

Lydia Saward

and I created, with words by Lydia, and drawings by me.

Bye for now,

---

There’s a PDF copy of the poem in my ever growing gallery of beautiful imagery, as well as the autumn leaf divider from this post, and all of my favourite fungi photographs taken in these woods and down the lane where I live.