The Pause
Isn’t it so like a gardener to choose a practical and yet poetic name? Such a good name...
It is what it is called and what it is called is a pleasure.
“...that time between Summer and Autumn which I call The Pause.”
A Welsh gardener said this astonishing phrase at the beginning of a humble video about rabbit-proofing her vegetable garden. I cannot get it out of my head. She was pushing a wheelbarrow full of plants through a simple camera frame of her rugged new homestead. She smiled as she said it, taking obvious pleasure in sharing the word. For all the ordinariness of the moment, to someone like me, the chronically emotive, it could have been the garden of Eden: She spoke and something was. More like it always was. Is. Existed. Exists. Naming can be a genesis.
I think back on my memory of what would have been The Pause in years past and I can see a clear awareness of it. It is there and truly something other than the categories I already knew. There is a space at the end of a season or measure of time that is also part of the beginning of another. It is something that cannot be fully part of either. It possesses elements of both and thus is forever like—but separate—from the others. Naming can be an incarnation.
I am certain that I have always known there was a Pause, but I’ve never seen it, not as something distinct, not until now. The name un-blends it from larger categories that once subsumed it, revealing new boundaries and qualities so plainly there that I can never unsee them. Naming can be an apocalypse.
That soulful, mildly cheeky woman altered my perception of both my present and my past with a word. I think it is reasonable to assume she has altered my future as well. This is the name of this space between Summer and Autumn and always will be. I can’t unlearn it and I am unlikely to forget it. The Pause is. Will be. Exists. Will exist.
Isn’t it so like a gardener to notice something small and profound? They thrive on quiet observation of rain and soil and foliage. Isn’t it so like a gardener to choose a practical and yet poetic name? Such a good name... It is what it is called and what it is called is a pleasure. If you’re a Hopkins nerd (I see you), you’re already declaiming, with your whole chest, like an absolute fool:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
It’s not every day you hear an echo of what it was like for Adam to name the animals, to witness some small sort of epistemological and ontological synthesis magicked into the world through the speaking of a word. That’s why this captured my attention so fully, why it fired my imagination. Reigning myself in will be another, more challenging matter, but today I get to play with it, to indulge my enthusiasm in thinking a new thought. Artsy people can’t help it, y’all; we will be insufferable.
That’s why I wrote this post as fast as I could. The Pause is too good, too true, and too beautiful not to share, to seed in the ground of the creatives I know. Also, I’m just not ready to let this moment go, to use or apply the many metaphors that present themselves in some other context. I want to be an effusive idiot about the thing itself, just for a little longer. It’s like a block of marble or wood ready to be carved, a bolt of new fabric uncut, a blank canvas with pallet and paints all neatly arrayed. The anticipation of the already and the not yet is a pleasure all its own. A Pause.
Liz Zorab and Byther Farm
This lovely woman has a remarkable story. She’s worth getting to know, even if you don’t give a flying fig about permaculture gardening in the UK.
