by Lisa Hamilton
The gardens and forest around the McLoughlin home currently host summer’s extroverted mingling with autumn’s introverted quietude. Summer is like that one charming friend we have: they are so much fun to be around, but their boundless energy is also somewhat exhausting. We might find ourselves looking forward to the doldrums of winter days as an excuse to hibernate and rejuvenate. Still, we feel a bittersweet sadness when our summer friend finally leaves, and we must reorient ourselves to the quiet again.
As I wandered around McLoughlin Gardens one morning in late October, I witnessed the merging of these seasonally strange bedfellows: summer and autumn. Ruby red Lily-of-the-valley berries poked out from under fallen maple leaves and darted through the stubbornly emerald-green hellebores. A rare and brilliant huckleberry dangled from the bush, still resisting the sacrifice of leaves to soil. A tangle of cranesbill geraniums flowered beside the bracken fern, brown and recoiling. The hydrangeas in the garden wore their lacy caps; their blooms, albeit substantially faded and worn, lingering into the cooler days of fall. These fading blooms share their structure with an even lacier companion, those hydrangea flower petals decaying until only their skeletal veins remain.
At this point in the year's wheel, the season is imbued with liminality. We are in the season of transition when life is still evident on the plants around us, yet the muted pallet of senescence creeps in to carry us into winter's dark stillness.
I’ve been curious about liminality lately. Those transitional, in-between spaces make us question our reliable tools for measuring time. Liminality fills time with a fertile pause. I want to call this pause an emptiness, except sometimes we misconstrue emptiness with lacking when, in fact, emptiness can also be a vessel for fullness; except, what this liminal space contains is not entirely held within it… yet.
I am fascinated by liminality precisely because it is so hard to define. It is more of a feeling: calm potential and easy anticipation. Liminality is the empty cup; you cannot have the cup without the emptiness to define it. The cup needs to be empty to be filled; there is no other way. In music, liminality fills the spaces between the notes.
There is, of course, McLoughlin Garden’s constant neighbour, the Salish Sea. The smell of the ocean seems headier to me in autumn, the scent of storms and decay. As I turn to face the water, a chorus of waterbirds sing, a single loon croons, and my ears catch the soothing wuffle of a sea lion, a veritable water horse.
