At the recent Edinburgh Book Festival I listened to the inspirational Ben Okri talk about the need for writers to hold an intensity of gaze, and his belief that ‘the universe writes through us’. Later that day Edinburgh Botanic Gardens talked with passion about native plants, the local names for these plants, and the folklore associated with them. Autumn is my favourite month and I’m sensing a change in the air as the days become cooler. As colours fade I’m struck by the beauty in dying wild flowers, their shape and structure, the rattling sound of seed-heads. Nature calls to be written about. Only last week clouds of thistle and dandelion heads floated in the wind and caught in my hair, and as I spat them from my lips I remembered as children we would blow on the dandelion and chant the question, ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’ ‘One o’clock.’ We would blow and ask again, ‘Two o’clock,’ and again, ‘Three o’clock,’ until all the silky parachutes had flown. Doon-Heid Clocks is the old Scots name for them. So what’s the best thing to do on a September morning? Okri suggests we ‘set out with the rising sun, and an empty mind, and wander the narrow path that leads to the sea.’ So on Sunday I did just that and a whole new world caught my gaze in a trim of wildings by the sea path –
A care-worn scabious cradled bees asleep in her arms
Wind teased yarns of willow herb down from candyfloss towers
Sea-buckthorn bellowed at the dead and the dying
Yet, tinged with autumn light, all was perfect in the fading