Our Culture Isn't Comfortable with Descent

Every season has its own kind of courage. Spring asks us to begin before we know what will flourish. Summer asks us to keep tending what we have planted. September gathers in the harvest, encouraging us to notice what has grown, often quietly, over the preceding months. October asks something altogether different. It asks whether we can trust a season that appears, at first glance, to be moving in the opposite direction.

The clocks will soon go back. The days continue to shorten. The woodland, so full only a few weeks ago, begins to reveal the spaces between the branches. Morning mist hangs longer over fields and woodland rides, softening familiar landscapes until they feel almost unfamiliar. The exuberance of summer has given way to something quieter, more measured. Even the sounds have changed. The riot of birdsong has faded and, in its place, the robin sings alone at dawn and dusk, his melancholy autumn song carrying through the stillness. It is easy to mistake this for decline. We often do.

Our language betrays us. We speak about the darker months as though they are something to endure before real life begins again. We count the days until spring. We apologise for slowing down. We worry that our motivation has disappeared, that something has gone wrong because we no longer possess the same energy we carried through summer. Nature tells a different story. Nothing in the woodland is trying to remain in July. The trees are not resisting the shortening days. Sap withdraws into the heartwood, conserving what will be needed through winter. Leaves release their grip once their work is complete. Seeds fall. Fungi emerge, quietly transforming what has died into nourishment for what will one day grow. Life has not stopped. It has simply shifted its attention. I wonder how different our lives might feel if we recognised that not every season is meant for expansion.

Much of modern life encourages us to think in straight lines. Growth is assumed to mean more. More confidence. More productivity. More certainty. More achievement. Even the language of personal development often suggests an endless upward trajectory, as though becoming fully ourselves should feel like a continual ascent. Real lives are rarely built that way. There are periods when we expand into the world and periods when we are invited back towards ourselves. Times for building and times for consolidating. Seasons that ask for courage in public and others that require courage in private. We move through all of them, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Some of the most significant turning points in my life have looked remarkably unremarkable from the outside. There was no dramatic announcement, no decisive break with the past, no triumphant sense of reinvention. Instead there was a growing awareness that the life I had organised around surviving no longer fitted the person I was becoming. At first, I interpreted that discomfort as failure. Surely if I were stronger, more resilient or more grateful, I would simply keep going.

Many of us have been taught to think this way. We admire endurance. We celebrate the people who carry on regardless. We quietly distrust our own need for rest, retreat or reconsideration. Yet there comes a point where perseverance ceases to be a virtue and becomes a refusal to recognise that the season has changed. The woods do not make that mistake. October is full of examples of intelligent retreat. The energy that sustained summer growth is not squandered trying to produce one last flush of leaves. It is gathered back into the trunk and roots. The apparent stillness is anything but passive. Hidden beneath bark and soil, extraordinary work continues. I think burnout often asks the same thing of us.

Not simply to stop..........To reorganise.

There is a difference.

Stopping without reflection can become another pause before returning to exactly the conditions that made us ill. Reorganisation asks more searching questions. What has this exhaustion revealed? Which parts of life have been sustained by determination alone? Which expectations belong to me, and which have been inherited from family, work or culture? What have I mistaken for strength that might actually have been fear?

These are not questions that can be answered at the pace they are usually asked. Perhaps this is one reason why so many of us resist descent. Descent slows us down. It removes distractions. It strips away the noise that has allowed us to postpone certain conversations with ourselves. That can feel profoundly unsettling. The old stories of these islands understood something about this. In the Ogham calendar, October belongs to Blackthorn, whose dark berries ripen only after the first frost has softened their bitterness. Blackthorn is associated with the Cailleach, the ancient guardian of the dark half of the year, who announces the arrival of winter with her blackthorn staff. She is not a comforting figure. She does not promise perpetual light or endless abundance. She reminds us instead that every living thing moves through seasons of contraction as well as expansion. I find it interesting that our myths rarely present wisdom as permanently youthful.

Again and again it is the older figures who understand the value of winter. Not because they enjoy hardship, but because they have lived long enough to know that life is cyclical rather than linear.

Blackthorn itself offers a similar lesson. For much of the year it appears almost forbidding, its dense thorny branches creating barriers that are difficult to penetrate. Yet those same thickets provide shelter for nesting birds, protection for small mammals and, later in the year, fruit that sustains wildlife through the colder months. What first appears inhospitable reveals itself, on closer attention, to be profoundly generous. I have met many people who remind me of blackthorn. People whose guardedness has been mistaken for coldness. Whose caution has been interpreted as distance. Whose boundaries have been read as rejection.

Spend enough time listening to their stories and another picture often emerges. The thorn was not the whole truth. It was simply what grew around something that needed protecting. Perhaps this is another reason our culture struggles with descent. We are uncomfortable with anything that cannot immediately demonstrate its value. We like visible progress, measurable outcomes and neat conclusions. October offers none of these. It invites us instead into a slower kind of confidence, one that trusts hidden work. The confidence that roots continue to grow beneath frozen ground. That fungi quietly weave connections through the soil. That trees preparing for winter are not abandoning life but safeguarding it.

There is relief in recognising that not every important thing announces itself while it is happening.

Some changes only become visible when we look back.

Some strengths are built in silence.

Some wisdom arrives disguised as interruption.

Standing in the woods at this time of year, I am struck less by what is ending than by the extraordinary intelligence with which everything prepares for what comes next. Nothing is hurried. Nothing apologises for the season it is in. The woodland is not trying to become spring. It is becoming a more complete version of autumn. Perhaps that is all any of us are being asked to do.

Not to rush ourselves back towards a season that has passed, nor to mistake descent for defeat, but to inhabit this one fully enough that, when the light eventually begins to return, we are ready to meet it with whatever quiet growth has been taking place beneath the surface.

From the Forest Edge

October has taught me that descent is not the opposite of growth.

It is one of the ways growth protects itself.

The woods know this instinctively. Perhaps the question is not whether we can avoid the darker seasons of our lives, but whether we can learn to trust that they, too, have their own kind of wisdom.