That voice is in my head again. It sneaks in every August; a throbbing, melancholy voice sighing sad words about loss and change.

“All the rainbows in the sky

Start to weep and say goodbye

You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore.

“Setting suns before they fall, echo to you that’s all, that’s all

“It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.”

It’s the voice of the legendary Roy Orbison coming through the car radio. He’s singing goodbye to a girlfriend who has broken his heart by being untrue.

To Roy it’s about being jilted. To me, his 1964 operatic rock ballad is about the loss of summer. Alas, another summer is ending.

There’s still a month to go before summer officially gives way to autumn. Leaves on the trees are fading but seem in no hurry to turn to their golds, crimsons and yellows. Temperatures are above normal, even at night. The lake is still warm enough for swimming.

The calendar, however, cannot be denied. Some students are back in school already and the remainder return to classes in less than two weeks. Birds and insects are saying their goodbyes to August blooms. They know that global warming or not, temperatures will start to fall any day now …

Sorry, but summer is over.

I’m not unhappy about that. I’ve never been a summer fan. Maybe that’s because of a fair chunk of life spent in Northwestern Ontario and Northern Alberta, places where summers can be fair but often short.

That’s not to say I dislike summer or begrudge those who love it. Most people relish the sun and heat and the swimming, golfing and other outdoor pursuits.

Some are seriously affected when summer ends. They suffer Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which most often strikes people during the winter. When it occurs in summer it’s called Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Studies show that roughly 15 per cent of Canadians will experience some SAD depression in their lifetimes, most because of winter, but many because of summer’s end.

U.S.-based National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAM) regards the late summer blues as serious enough to declare September Suicide Prevention Month.

For me, there is something special about the end of summer. It is a time of beauty and plenty.

Late summer blooms, domestic and wild, put on a glorious show before wilting and waiting for the early frosts to end their year.

Fresh vegetables become abundant. Corn and tomatoes, available only in cans or shipped in from far-off places at other times of the year, are close at hand to be picked fresh.

Whether you are outside admiring the flowers, or picking corn, you can do so without the painful bother or mosquitoes and other bugs. They are not all gone yet, but they certainly are a lot less numerous than they were a month or so ago.

Summer’s end also is a time for reflection, and for planning. While thinking back on the joys of a terrific summer, it’s time to start planning for winter and it’s special joys. There is curling and hockey and skiing and skating to look forward to.

And, for many there is planning for that winter vacation that probably has been postponed for the last couple of years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There also are holidays and festivities to look forward to: Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, then Christmas and New Year’s.

Sunbathing days certainly are gone, or going, but the change from summer to fall does not mean an end to comfort and warmth.

I’m looking forward to wearing my bomber jacket and feeling a fluffy wool blanket on the bed. Then there’s the comfort foods. A bowl of hot soup or warm chili.

The change of season brings change to many parts of our lives, and that’s a good thing. What we eat and what we wear changes with the season and so does how we think.

Human beings need change. Change refreshes our attitudes and allows us to replace old, worn-out thinking.

We are lucky to live in a place where Nature provides change four times a year.

 My lawnmower has been put away for the winter. I doubt if I’ll bring it out next spring.

This year I didn’t cut the grass until well into June. It grew to a foot high with native grasses and weeds.

The idea was to allow the grass to get a firm, healthy footing before being mowed. The result was a surprise: everything in the lawn grew tall and healthy, and some tiny but beautiful flowers bloomed.

Among the blooms were five-petalled purple wild violets that had drifted in on the wind and taken hold in the lawn. Along with, of course, the white clover hated by many lawn enthusiasts.

These flowers attracted pollinators like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.

What I saw in my uncut lawn helped me to understand the movement to make our landscapes more natural. It’s called rewilding and can take many forms, but, simply put, it is about making our environments, and our lifestyles, more natural.

Rewilding projects are as small as letting your lawn grow naturally, and as big as reintroducing large mammals to places where they once were numerous. For instance, Rewilding Europe is working to establish herds of bison in parts of Europe where they once existed.

Scientists say that large mammals such as bison, deer, moose and lions act as landscape engineers, shaping the composition of plant life and wildlife – from birds and aquatic creatures to trees and soil organisms. They are an important part of natural processes that alleviate damage created by unhealthy greenhouse gases causing global warming.

Meanwhile, I saw my uncut lawn as prettier and more useful to the environment than a mowed one.

There are an estimated one-quarter billion lawns in North America – 230 million in the United States, six million plus in Canada and some in Mexico, although Mexicans are not nearly as enamoured with them as we are.

That’s a lot of lawns, but there will be fewer in the future. More people are seeing lawns for what they really are – water hungry monocultures devoid of any plant diversity and insect life. They are outdated symbols of the past and a sign of our disconnection from nature.

Lawns began appearing in 17th century England when aristocrats were rich enough to manicure their land for display, instead of farming it for food.

By the 1950s, manicured lawns became symbols of the good life in North American suburbs. Along with green grass that did nothing except look pretty and drink water came lawnmowers, trimmers, blowers, chemical fertilizers and weed killers.

Letting your lawn return to a natural state is not easy, and likely won’t make you popular with your neighbours. However, it can be done on a small scale, one piece of lawn at a time turned into a patch of wildflowers.

It’s all about creating more diversity – helping populations of insects, animals, fish and birds recover. More natural populations of these creatures help to reduce the damage of atmospheric carbon.

Before there is any rewilding of a yard, field or anything else there has to be human rewilding. That involves undoing the unhealthy practices of today and going back to more natural ways of living.

Human rewilding doesn’t mean we need to revert to wearing animal skins and living in caves. It means thinking about how to live with less of what we want and don’t really need.

One thing we do really need is food, and food equality, yet despite all the advances in agriculture, growing enough nutritious food to feed a growing world population is becoming a worry.

Matthew Evans, author of Soil: The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy, writes that between polluting/poisoning of the land and erosion, the world has lost an estimated one-third of its cropland in the last 40 years.

He notes research that says arable land per capita has been declining since 1984, and so have grain and fish production per capita.

We never will eliminate all the waste and pollution that we create. However, by changing our thinking about what we really need, we can work to ensure that pollution and waste don’t grow faster than nature can absorb, recycle or neutralize them

I was having one of those bad days that everyone has. Hot water tank gave out, thunder storm took out satellite service and a boat flying a flag with an obscenity for the prime minister raced along the shoreline for all the young swimmers to see.

(Covid seems to have robbed some people of any small bits of intelligence they might have possessed. Many of us dislike Trudeau but intelligent protests are done at the ballot box, not with obscene language in public).

At any rate, it had been a heavily depressing day so I took a walk to a favourite place in the woods. There’s a marsh there, almost 100 per cent covered with lily pads and their spectacular star-like blooms.

It was early evening and I noticed the pure white blooms with their yellow centres appeared shrunken; not widely open and smiling at the sky as they do on sunny mornings.

Then it struck me: here was another important lesson from Mother Nature, the greatest of all teachers.

Water lilies wake up in the morning, spreading their petals wide to take in whatever the day has to offer. It may be happy sunshine or rain and ripping winds, but they accept it all and go about their business of providing food to beaver and moose, shelter to fish and pollination for the ecosystem. And, of course, calming beauty to an increasingly frenetic world.

In late afternoon or early evening they fold their petals, closing the book on the day’s events. Then they rest, recharging their energy for when morning light opens their blooms for another day.

Like many things in nature, the water lily is smarter than we humans. It knows when to close down and recharge, and when to open a new chapter. Tomorrow is another day.

Too often, humans don’t know when to stop. We push ahead with tasks and disputes without taking time out to pause, reconsider and regroup.

Water lilies are magical. They grow out of the mud several feet below the water’s surface, producing waxy pads that float on the water’s surface. The flowers produce seeds that sink to the pond’s bottom and produce new growth.

There are several dozen species of water lilies growing around the world in different sizes and different colours. Ones found in the Amazon can have flowers 100 to 200 centimetres (three to six feet) in width and pads that can hold as much as 30 kilograms (66 pounds).

Water lilies have spiritual significance in some cultures. In Buddhism and Hinduism the lilies symbolize resurrection because the petals close at night and reopen in the morning, similar to spiritual rebirth.

Buddhists also believe that the water lily represents enlightenment because its beautiful blooms emerge from the darkness of a muddy pond bottom. There is an Egyptian creation story that says the Sun God, the earth’s creator, emerged from a primordial water lily and banished the darkness.

It is hard to think of another flower that has been more drawn, painted or photographed than the water lily. There are tens of thousands of water lily photos to be seen through books, magazines and online.

Claude Monet, the famous French impressionist, produced a series of 250 water lily oil paintings over a 12-year period. They depict the flower gardens at his home in Giverny, a village in northern France.

His water lily paintings are wildly popular and sell for millions whenever one is put to auction. One of the paintings auctioned in 2014 brought in $54 million U.S, dollars

Vincent Van Gough, another famous artist, is not known to have spent a lot of time painting water lilies. However, he produced a pen-pencil drawing of water lilies in a pond when he was young and deciding whether to become an artist

Water lilies do not seem to have caught the eye of writers as much as they have of painters. However, the Turkish writer Mehmet Murat Ildan has written a line that captures the essence of this wonderful plant:

“In a marshland amongst the crocodiles, there float beautiful water lilies! Even in the Hell, one can find the good and the beauty.”

 

The best advice given the way the world is recently came from a man celebrating his 100th birthday.

Norman Lear, who produced the famous 1970s Archie Bunker show titled All in the Family, wrote a birthday piece advising people to stay forward-focussed. It appeared in the July 27 edition of The New York Times.

“It’s an attitude that has served me well through a long life of ups and downs,” Lear wrote, noting that a deep appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition also helped.

Staying forward-focussed is something everyone needs to remember these days. There are too many things needing immediate attention to be spending time looking back.

Our world faces rapid global warming, increasingly dangerous viruses, hunger and growing food shortages, huge economic problems, increasing violence and politicians more focused on nastiness than true leadership.

It’s a long list, getting longer. Some of the issues are big enough to threaten civilization as we know it.

It is good to look back and learn. To see mistakes, analyze them and make changes that will help us to not make them again.

Last week’s papal visit to Canada is an example. It had Canadians looking back at the horrors of residential schools in which our governments, aided by Christian religions (60 per cent Roman Catholic, 40 per cent others), tried to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eliminating their languages and cultures. Pope Francis called abuses of the residential school system “catastrophic.”

The residential school system was outright racism. Racism against Indigenous peoples that still exists today.

It was good to look back and see, and perhaps understand, how the residential school system destroyed so many families.

What isn’t good is to see the anger and negativity shown by some during and after the pope’s six-day visit. Some would not accept the Pope’s apology for the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools. Some said the apology was not enough; more was needed.

I worry that the negativity and anger will continue, and suck up energy that could be useful in helping to solve the issues threatening our lives today. No one should ever forget the atrocities of residential school racism, but we need to get forward-focussed on what can be done to save our future.

Indigenous people have much to offer for solving today’s serious issues. Certainly, many follow modern living styles like the rest of us. However, their traditions, experience and knowledge of nature should be recognized as important in finding ways to improve, or even save life, on this planet.

One of the world’s biggest issues, and one getting scant attention, is food. An estimated 800 million people around the globe still go hungry. As their bellies growl, the amount of arable land for growing food is shrinking.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 40 to 50 per cent of the world’s current agricultural land is severely degraded. That affects the food supply of up to 3.2 billion people.

The food we eat now is less diverse and less nutritious than the food eaten by Indigenous people of the past. We live in a processed food culture that produces bigger fruits and vegetables that are grown faster to produce more profit at the expense of nutrition.

Indigenous peoples ate more nutritious and more diverse food. Their physical and spiritual connections with the earth allowed them to gather or grow natural foods without chemicals dangerous to the body and the environment.

It makes sense that we accept Indigenous knowledge and traditions as part of our search to ensure a healthy future for our planet

There are many past problems that Indigenous people must deal with. Not to mention current ones – like the dozens of Indigenous communities without clean water because of federal government inaction.

My hope is that while trying to deal with their specific problems, they will become a major part of a forward-focussed movement attempting to solve climate change and the many serious issues stemming from it.

Staying forward-focussed is good advice from a sharp-thinking elder. I think even Archie Bunker would agree with that.

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