Seeds, winds, circlings

Autumn equinoctial winds whip through neighbourhood lanes. It’s a circling back to this time last year when I began consciously noticing and photographing what’s happening with insect pollinators and other more-than-humans living here.

Hopping chaffinches laboriously harvest the oily black seeds spinning out of cracked flax pods. And the wax eyes have arrived back in the hebes, picking at a potpouri of seed heads. Swollen fruit and berries – from flowers fertilised earlier by pollinators – begin to release and die. A profusion of their seeds scatter out. Capsules of future life. The valley reminds me of the repeating pulses, patterns and cycles. Old friends again.

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First fruits

Picking ripening apples and plums on garden trees, foraging for blackberries in gullies, watching swelling pumpkins and birds eating karaka and karamu berries. Today I’m acknowledging all the unpaid work of our pollinator neighbours which now bears juicy fruit under the midsummer heat. Food for all of us – humans and more-than-humans.

Artist, writer and psychotherapist Juliet Batten’s calls this time ‘First Fruits’ – Te Waru (Māori) Lugnasad (Celtic) Lammas (Christian). It celebrates early harvest time and is one of eight seasonal markers based on pre-Christian nature-based festivals, brought into rhythm with Aotearoa’s southern seasons and into a relationship with practices and knowledge of Te Ao Māori.

Link to Juliet Batten and her books