This is the foreword for my upcoming book Sovereigns of the Seasons - it takes the form of something as an essay/meditation on aging…
Sovereigns of the Seasons Foreword
Today is Halloween, perhaps the most blatantly mystical point on the wheel of the year. It certainly wears its supernatural heart on its sleeve. As I cast my eyes around the hall of the seasonal sovereigns I still see a number of empty thrones, but I feel those who have arrived have revealed enough to me to write this introduction.
This book has been a number of years in the making, in fact a few others have jumped the queue. The reason being that as the book took shape, these lords and ladies became not only guardians and shapers of the external world but also of my physical and psychological one.
The songs and stories of the spritely Green Man, the Maypole’s stirring passions, and the swallows escorting the sun’s royal presence came easily enough. These spirits of force and vigour are after all the first we befriend on our own journey round the wheel. The sun’s heat drives and invigorates us as we root our wills in the rich earth of possibility and paint the earth with the green shoots of our imaginations and achievements. These are the pleasures and pitfalls of youth and early adulthood as we traverse and transform the outer world. The art and poems of the first half of the book bask in the sun’s glories and dance throughout a bright and busy world.
Where spring and summer cast out, the colder months call in. As I move through my mid-forties these lessons (albeit resisted) have finally found me! Much like the Autumn leaves only find their majesty when they abandon the ordered branches of their parental tree, I also have come to embrace the gravity of unrealised ambitions and lost dreams. When the leaf has reached its full width, and the apple has taken its fullest colour, it must be released to feed the earth and the next spring. I won’t go into details here but suffice to say I have thrown some material and personal aspirations to the winds, in hope they will whisper new dreams to me.
As those winds rise, the earth turns to ambiguous snow drifts and dazzling ice. The winter world comes sweeping away the lush colours and strong images of the summer season. The time of dreams comes upon us. Perhaps we visit this world in times of quiet reflection and our sleep but this is not to truly know the winter. Like the flower shivering in a cool night or the leaves shaking in a fierce wind, we have but a glimpse of that waiting strangeness. Even as I welcome the winter sovereigns into this book, I know they reveal only a glimpse of their mysteries - their greatest revolutions await me - for now.
As the garish delights of Halloween pass and the contemplative cold draws in, I settle down to write and dream, to send out these poems with spring’s green shoots.
May the Sovereigns guide you
Graeme