winter passing
snowdrops and badger tracks, injury and slow days with books...
Hello lovely ones, how is your winter journeying? Are you enjoying the glide of slow days to the last of January or hopping a ride straight onto February without a backward glance? Wherever or however this long month is taking you I am glad you’re here with me now, holding your big warm hearts out to wrap me in. Thank you all, I feel your warmth…
Me, I am taking the days in small bites. No choking on the wounds left by seasons past nor expecting the scars to taste sweet. One day, then another, then another, hoping for the goodness in the world to outshine the bad, each one like the verse of a new hymn we are slowly learning by heart. I am not sure this is how January is intended to be sung but this year any other way feels out of tune.
And, anyway, the choice of tempo I know and love ordinarily, be it sung to the sky or danced on the hill, has been whisked from under me; injury is forcing slow days with gentle humming, whether I like it or not.
Winter is a feeling. A lawless liquid light feeling, fickle and fractious, contrary mostly, yet sometimes tender — especially in the way wind arrives in a sudden icy gust, then turns with a chuckle only to return with a warm kiss then glacial once again —hours of sunshine when we need them most are too few, the length of time clouds remain touching the ground too many. Regardless the colour of the day we feel winter flowing like ice in our veins both invigorating, calming, demanding, ambivalent, not so much asking for attention but insisting on acceptance that it will be both beautifully calm and savagely wild.
Many of us clothe ourselves in armour at this time of year, braced for the inevitable doldrums the dark season carries; the expectation of anything at all inspirational or motivational is like believing in the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. And yet it makes no sense that we should feel this way. To be given a new set of days, to watch them trembling, empty, waiting to be filled with whatever we wish, isn’t that a very real gift we’d do well to accept without grumbling?
Sure, if the sky didn’t insist on opening quite so regularly, if the clouds weren’t so permanently in mourning, if the landscape would wear its winter clothes with a joy that was just a little more obvious acceptance would be easier. But, regardless of all that seems visibly miserable there are pockets of light, there are whiskers and noses and scents and tracks, there are whole forests caught haphazardly upside down in droplets, wood pigeon flying in murmurations, palest lemon catkins wriggling in the wind, there is writing downturned smiles into upturned words and stories.
There are discoveries impossible during the dry hot months;
On a morning when the hillsides are still shaking off night, when first sunbeams timidly slither between folds of darkness parting land from sky and a deep frost clings onto curtains of fog in a ghostly ocean with seaweed trees, I am walking between the ash and frosted ivy on the path along the way to the sheep field. There is a musky scent in the air I do not expect, not the acrid scent of fox or the taint of wild boar, this is mustelidae, musky-strong, it is unmistakably badger. It is the second morning in this slow month I have caught his presence in the stinging sharpness of the fresh morning air. There are no other signs. Then, the beam from my flashlight falls on footprints I recognise. I want to believe but scarcely dare to.
A badger has passed through my woodland.
Small things, yes, but even scents and footprints become smiles and stories.
Aren’t these beauty enough?
Inspiration enough?
After all, neither the sky nor the clouds or the skeletal trees on the landscape — telling their own haunting stories — or anything else that makes this the season of eternally dark mornings and evenings will remain longer than it takes for all that is spring to take centre stage.
Briefly — Swirling in the fog and the mist, in the low blankets of cloud are all the plans and fuzzy projects I have for spring. Some are mighty, many are small. All of them form, deform then reform and dissolve again at the will of the wind. I hope by spring they will be still and I will be moving again.
Yesterday morning I stopped for too many minutes just to listen to the conversation between a Robin and a Mistle Thrush, I could have listened all day though I understood not a single word.
If I look past the blurry, grey-damp tenacity of mid-winter, past the mist hanging over fields with the beginnings of green; the faintest wanton echo of spring is calling. I am constantly amazed that as fragile as everything seems now, it will still abandon all caution — as I do so often — to begin before spring has whispered ‘go! it’s time!’
I am stepping gently — not entirely due to injury — in the grey quiet of these final January days. I make simple acts into gifts; preparing vegetables from the garden for warming soups — leeks with lovage waiting like frozen art in cubes from the depths of the freezer — revelling in the warmth of the stove after carrying in logs, watching raindrops land quiver and fall, land quiver and fall again. Knowing that certain beauties of the four legged kind have begun their mating dance. I am delighted by snowdrops — can there ever be enough white bells embellishing woodland or garden? — by silvery light from a languid wintery sun… there’s so much to consider in the moments a slow day, only one is insufficient time, a year, even a whole life is insufficient to note each and every gifted miracle.
Last year in late spring, when the earth was still soft and crumbly like chocolate cake, I unearthed a rusty drum hidden on the bank. I pulled and dug to release it from root and stone and with it many tiny white bulbs were dislodged. I stopped and gathered and replanted those that were escaped, left the rusting drum half buried, returning earth and leaf-mulch and waited. For this year. I had a feeling… Today the bulbs are snowdrops, their dainty white bells cover half the bank, next year there will be more…
Injury favours time in my favourite room in this rambling old farmhouse, the one that is coldest, the one that is filled with draughts and and the scent of wax and woodsmoke, the one that holds the memories of Seth, his curious charcoal eyes watching flames behind glass make shadows on the ceiling when he was just four days old. The one where I sat with Rosie holding her broken heart in arms. An intimacy not found in any other season wraps me within its four ancient walls. I melt willingly into corners filled with dust motes and memories and piles of books unopened for too many years. They invite me to sit a while, to be still a while —a pleasure so rare I had almost forgotten how.
I discover many long forgotten words on the musty pages. I wonder how I ever forgot them in the first place.
“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong,
On events of the last weeks…
With love from dusty book filled corners
Some things I have loved this week;
marguerite rosenfern - is a new writer on Substack. Her first post begins;
He’s gone, flown away. I was fine in pigeon pose, fine head down at my ankles, skimming the ground, fine as we lengthened and twisted, so long as my eyes were squeezed shut.
and it just gets better!
Fotini Masika is writing a poem a day, she explains;
Each story, when read, reveals more than what its author may have intended to share by writing it. Isn’t this how books cast their spells?
Unaware of what may come, I read. Slowly. One chapter a day. Words dance and poems arise.
Forty chapters.
Forty found poems.
Forty days till February expires.
Each one is exquisite.
“Winter is a feeling. A lawless liquid light feeling, fickle and fractious, contrary mostly, yet sometimes tender”… from the first words you enchant me, dear Susie - what a joy to read each carefully crafted sentence, to be enveloped by your heart and drawn into this beauty… If I write with grace, with violence, with poetry or certainty, if I coax tears and laughter and break hearts and remake them, it is because I read grace first in every line that you write. You are a Word Witcher x
Your writing is such a balm Susie, pale luminous phrases akin to those welcome pearly white snowdrops (ours will be awhile yet). Heal well, keep drinking the magic.