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It’s finally beginning to happen, that long slow slide into the dark. Here in the North, the shadows, those places where I’m always most at home, are already beginning to lengthen; the light is showing the faintest signs of goldening. When I wake up at four in the morning, it’s still just about dark. August teases; August knows. It knows where it’s heading, for all its glory and glitter.

The relief of it is fast settling into my bones, because there’s something existentially threatening about summer. The energies are too fiery, too wild, and by the time June happens along with its too-bright, too-pleased-with-itself face, my sense of self has always already begun to dissolve. No matter how much I might love the beauty of the alders in full leaf by the riverside, appreciate the roses in the garden and the hares in the fields, rejoice in the dunnocks, spotted flycatchers, chaffinches and blackbirds all nesting together in the ancient ivy on the north-facing wall of this old house – I just can’t find a way to really belong to anything. In summer, my life feels shapeless and shallow. My roots rise to the surface of life, and I feel as if I have no solid anchor.

Yes, summer uproots me – but all that changes when autumn sets up camp just below the horizon, climbing a little closer each day. Already, I’m beginning to feel my core strengthen, to be reminded of who I am. Isn’t that a strange thing? I can’t explain why all this should be so – I can only tell you that it is. Now, at Lughnasa, the time when we all reap what we’ve sown, it’s time to plunge those roots down deep again. The outer world loosens its tight grip, and there’s not so much that can shake me. I’m more able to stand strong in the winter half of the year, like any old tree that has shed its leaves, more easily able to resist the coming storm. Now I too am less likely to break. Words flow into me, root and branch, bottom up and top down – and there’s no resistance, nothing to stand in their way. I feel in tune with my calling and with the seasons of my life, ready for something new and unexpected to feel its way carefully out of the growing dark, ready for that relentless cycle of transformation to start spinning its wheels again.

Not very long after I first met him, twenty years ago now, David brought me – carefully cradled in two hands as if he were offering up a glimpse of a precious, newly hatched bird – a battered, page-shedding old paperback book that he declared had been the forming of him at fourteen. It was the Penguin Classics version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and I wasn’t much impressed. Most couples seem to bicker about money or what to watch on TV. For the first few months of our relationship, we bickered about Nietzsche. Every now and again, we still do.

Personally, I don’t like Nietzsche. And yes, for sure: at 64 years old and after a lifetime of intense and diverse study and reading, I get to say that now without feeling the need to justify myself to anyone who roundly and categorically declares him to be a genius. It’s not actually obligatory to like geniuses, you see. Most of his writing seems a bit hysterical to me (all those exclamation marks ...) and then of course by the end he was full-on bonkers (psychologist’s technical term, sorry). But although I don’t much relate to many of his guiding principles, there are some fragments of his thinking that I do admire. He was, for example, and to quote W. H. Auden, a great ‘debunker of our liberal fallacies’. And we could do with a fully fledged Nietzsche or two snapping at the heels of a few of our most dearly held certainties right now. Humans have a tendency to think we’re very much cleverer than we actually are. The mirror Nietzsche held up to us showed us all of the ways we’re actually not.

For the same reasons that make me wish that people who’ve never managed to get through even a single volume of his Collected Works (though that would require stamina, I accept) wouldn’t quote Jung out of context and consequently often completely misinterpret him, I believe you should never quote Nietzsche unless you’ve read his entire oeuvre. These guys just weren’t dealing in soundbites and snappy memes. Every single thing they said depends. Well, entirely lacking that necessary stamina myself, I haven’t done anything remotely resembling such a thing for Nietzsche – but of course David has. And so I feel confident about focusing on this particular tiny fragment of his extensive output, since a devoted disciple has confirmed that I’m not running the risk of getting it all wrong.

Early on in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes about the ways in which, when we’re young, we make judgements ‘without that art of nuance which constitutes the best thing we gain from life’. But later in life, he suggests, we might wake up and turn on ourselves, furious at having deluded ourselves for so long. We might then (and here I’m using my own words, not Nietzsche’s) ‘do the inner work’, ‘confront our Shadow’, and so convince ourselves that we’re very much wiser now. We’ll start to make different but equally firm judgements, and snippy declarations about the state of the world based on a solid belief in this newly descended, immense wisdom of ours. We’ll maybe even consider ourselves to be finished, cooked, done. But beware: at the end of the relevant passage in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche adds, devastatingly: ‘A decade later: and one grasps that all this too – was still youth!’

I’m sure it’s entirely possible to argue that Nietzsche is saying here that we’re all destined to be eternal children – and eternal youth syndrome is certainly a Thing – but I don’t see it quite that way. Here’s what I’d like to imagine he’s saying: that we’re all destined eternally to change and grow. Every time we think we’ve arrived, decide that now we’re properly wise, or imagine that now we’re fully grown, something happens to make us understand that we still have a very, very long way to go. I don’t see much evidence that Nietzsche was a man for mirth, but for me, faced with all those ‘key life events’ that are designed to take us down a peg or several, laughter has always been the only intelligent and life-affirming response. The Fates in Greek mythology were three old women, and I bet you they liked a good laugh too, while they were spinning and measuring and snipping away at our lives, and keeping the entire cosmos in balance at the same time and on the side.

I like this passage of Nietzsche’s because it says something about the cyclicity of life, and for me that entails the equally cyclical nature of calling. Perhaps I’m thinking about all this now not just because the coming of autumn always reattaches me to whatever this thread is that I seem to be following – but because I keep encountering younger women who are doing really good work, but who are worried that precisely because they’re doing that good work, they’ve already arrived at their calling, and so surely there could be no big transformations left for them to undergo. Even the dissolving fires of midlife and menopause are likely to pass them by because, they tell me earnestly, they’ve already changed into the person they were always meant to be, and are already doing the work they were always meant to do. So what do all these notions of everlasting transformation and ever-shifting calling that I keep peddling have to do with them?

Whenever I hear this kind of thing, I’m irritating enough always to smile. Kindly, I promise, but when you’re young, elders who think they know better than you are always irritating, whether or not their intentions are kind. (And I can certainly be irritating, whether or not I’m smiling.) But the thing is, I’ve undergone a big basketful of major transformations during my six and a half decades of life, and I don’t think I’m remotely done yet. Every time I find myself very sure about something, ‘the universe’ calmly toddles along and bashes me over the head with a sledgehammer, reminding me that actually, I know bugger-all. When I was 59, though I was far from complacent about it and always believed I had very much more to learn, I too felt that I’d reached and was fully living out my calling. I was a successful author; I was a successful teacher. I was doing the work I’d always longed to do and that I loved. This is what I would always do; this is what I would always be. Tick.

And then along came an aggressive form of lymphoma in the middle of a locked-down global pandemic, and everything turned on its head again. On the outer surface of my life, nothing much might seem to have changed: I’m recovered, still writing and still (though very much less frequently) teaching. But deep inside me, a landslide happened. Everything shifted and it’s all shifting still – and that’s how I know I still have skin in the game. We’re never quite fully cooked, and if the day comes when we imagine we are, we’re ripe for a burning. I don’t know what will become of me, but I know that there’s always something new to become. If we get to a point where we think there isn’t, we’re just not doing life properly at all. Because life isn’t a linear progression: everything is always coming back around. The serpent is always consuming its own tail.

It seems appropriate, then, as summer finally begins to fades and I begin to come home to myself again, that in autumn I’ll be offering the first short online course I’ve ever done that focuses entirely on calling. (Alternatively, a live daylong workshop in London on December 6.) On understanding that finding and living into our calling is a journey that never ends; it’s a place we never arrive at. If all this interests you, have a peek at the short video in the section that follows.

And because one good video is never enough, and because I’ve been talking about changes and seasons and landslides, I offer you this piece of perfection from the inimitable Stevie Nicks, alive and still changing here at the fine age of fifty. It should be on every growing woman’s playlist.

Wishing you all the fertile fruitfulness of whatever season you find yourself in right now,

More about this next month – but just a reminder that The Fairy Tale Heroine Oracle, illustrated by the ever-wonderful Amanda Clark, is out in the world on September 9. The Fairy Tale Heroine Oracle reflects my exploration of fairy tales over the past two decades, and elements of my original conceptualisation of ‘The Fairy-Tale Heroine’s Journey’, which I’ve written about extensively here at The Art of Enchantment. Do think of pre-ordering to be sure of receiving your copy as soon as its available. (It’s out worldwide from Hay House at Penguin Random House, and you can purchase it anywhere you usually purchase your books and cards.) Find out more here.

And finally – a reminder that we’re still embroiled in our Myth Summer School here at The Art of Enchantment; next Saturday (9th), we’ll be continuing with the strange old Arthurian tale of ‘Gorlagon the Wolf-King’, thinking about the question that Guinevere asks of Arthur – ‘What is the nature and heart of a woman’ – and his rather pitiful response to it. Read all about it here, and if you’d like to be part of the program, please do consider upgrading your subscription. It’s easy to catch up on what you’ve missed so far: all texts, audio, reflections and the recording of the live session are available in the archives.