Au-gust-tumn in Edinburgh

Thank you for your lovely responses to last week's MindLetter - we are a reading, hiking, reflective bunch!

I'm glad to say that the coming semester's mindfulness courses are both now open for bookings. You can find out more about the Staff and PGR course, as well as the Student course, both starting week of September 28th; and if you'd like to book into a day retreat, this semester's will be on Saturday 14^th November. 

We had a rich and stimulating second meeting today of the new Student Support and Wellbeing Journal Club, discussing a paper on student loneliness; if the club has passed you by, and you're staff in a student support or wellbeing role, you're most welcome to join the mail-list.

For this week's MindLetter, I turned seasonal...

Au-gust-tumn in Edinburgh

In Edinburgh, autumn begins in August. Drifts of heat-stricken leaves lie on the ground, apples bejewel trees, and the sun, for all its height, has softened to a pearlescent sphere in the sky. Most significant is the wind: not for Edinburgh the gentle gusts of late summer; rather, a gale in the face, panting perplexity as one rounds Queen’s Drive on a bike, unable to believe that just a month ago one was speeding merrily in balmy mountain air upon the immaculate back roads south of San Francisco. This week, while family and friends down south begged me to send on my rain, my windows blistered with downpours. In Edinburgh, August is an in-between month that has already signed up to the turning of the earth, and we have no choice but to keep dancing upon it.

Au-gust-tumn is a chimera of a season, a beneficence and a letting go. For all its fruitfulness, it demands simplicity. After the heady abandon of June and July, and the license of long days spent chasing the sun, now is the time both for projects to come to fulfilment and for what is extraneous to be released. At this time of year, a messy flat makes me feel nervous; the animal in me, attuned to the change in the air, wants to get my things in order. This winter jacket needs a new zip, that overflowing bookcase paring back, the freezer clearing out for apples already wind-falling. Harvest-time brings rejoicing, but the table piled with bounty also offers us clarity about the time ahead: hopes and foretellings aside, this is what is really here; this is what is important; this is what we must carry with us.

For me, when I think of August in Edinburgh, I think of 2020. I had arrived in September 2019 and plunged straight into work, followed a few months later by the outbreak of the pandemic. Late that summer, when I returned after lockdown into eerie urban silence, I got to know Edinburgh as a city stripped bare of its bustle. There was something about the quiet, the hours spent walking the streets of Marchmont, Morningside, Bruntsfield and the Old Town, looking out from Castle Terrace, climbing Blackford Hill every day after work, that made me feel I was coming to know these parts of town in a deep abiding way that could not have been possible otherwise.

It was a limbo of a time, illness and uncertainty rife, the future like a whisper in the wind, constantly dissolving; but somehow in Edinburgh I felt safe. Even the eventual winter lockdown could not shake my love for the place. It was as if that strange autumn allowed me to walk it into my feet and breathe it into my lungs. Life, though constricted, felt very simple, and there was something about the simplicity that made bonds form, where they could, as true and deep as the sea. In a visceral way, my sense of Edinburgh as my home is one of Edinburgh in this strange season: cool cheeks in the Hermitage of Braid; sun shining on a drenched Arthur’s Seat; great apples swelling, poised to thud, in Grange Cemetery.

This week the children went back to school in Scotland, and the early morning thumping from the little boys who live upstairs recommenced. It’s a cheerful sound, like waves slapping on the beach at high tide. The rhythm of children going back to school is a drumbeat, passing like a baton to the students already in the universities on pre-sessional courses – and we can sense the next push already, readying ourselves for the blast of seventeen-year-old energy, returning students landing in the inbox, the air beginning to shake and thrum. Rhythms have their own agency, make things possible that at other times might only stutter and start. At this time of year, we want to get a little quiet, so we can listen for the bass line we want to join.

It can feel counterintuitive to put things down when we want to rev up, to slow when we sense the oncoming tsunami of speed. But to meet the energy demands that lie ahead, we need to get clear about what is in the pantry to sustain us, and what the through-line will be. A friend sitting Finals once told me that exams were like kickboxing: you aim not for the pad, but for the space beyond the pad. Feel for the sense of home, the stable base, the drumbeat, bassline, rhythm, that will carry you through the months to come, as the lingering warmth of August days slips seamlessly into cool nights and mizzled mornings, and thousands of young people arrive to make their myriad ways on autumnal ground.

I’ll race you to those windfalls in Grange Cemetery.

Warm wishes,

Kitty