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Edges
There is a storm, raging wildly in the south. But here, we are tucked out of the way, sheltered by Pennines and just waiting on the fringes of the swirling cloud of the weather maps. Fat, soft, wet snow is falling quietly, not sticking enough to dull the sound of the main road, but enough to make a solid snowball, scooped from the ground in the dark before the temperature rises.
The breeze is calm, and those flakes heavy around the streetlights. I spot one or two people, who, like me, are framed in yellow window light, wrapped in a blanket, watching, just watching. Snow brings something magical, something primal, if only for a few hours. I watch the flakes fall and fall and fall.
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The long exhale
Solstice came and went, a little calm in the dead of night that December blackly embodies. Inky stillness, minute ticking past the next, thick, soupy darkness, yet the gradual inch forwards. In this all, in this silence, I deflated. The few weeks away from everything held me softly as I finally let go of the tightness barely carrying me through 2025. A long out breath. A muscle finally relaxed. Why now? I don’t know. But finally, finally. A welcome crumpling of the soul, floating on that liminality that always exists in these last few weeks.
Ice stills the world outside. No time for resolutions, this. Short days and frost, deep dark nights and waiting. To be and just exist, bare essence as the leafless tree branches, clear soul as the vast starry sky. How can we muster energy to resolve, at this time? Forcing brightness and momentum in the stillest part of the year. It is right to stop, and rest, and let that small, infinitesimal current carry us forward to brighter days. To consider but let things lie. To plod on earth crisp underfoot and trust that come spring, energy and vibrancy will rise once more.
I felt as though 2025 was tight around me. I did too much, building and chasing and trying to prove something to anyone and everyone around me. Finally, in this deep dark winter, something shifted. A block removed, a stone plopping into a pond, the soft thud of melting snow from a branch. Clarity. The softness to stop trying. A few weeks away from social media filling the days with colour so I remembered how real life is. Doing real things in real worlds, and even in the slowness of winter there are infinite layers of experience. I missed that. I don’t want to go back. I feel like I returned after a long time away, somehow. I breathe out, with the moon and the snow and the dark blue night. I breathe in with the diamond pinpricks of stars, with the icy ferns of jack frost as he spreads over the land, with the hint of oak and peep of tiny snowdrops above the dark earth.
I breathe out again, and wait, and float, and trust.
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Permagrey
Each morning the curtains open to a sky painted in a flat monotone, devoid of colour. Grey saturates the days, saturates my breath, my soul. Deep in December, the UK permagrey drains me slowly, steadily, a drip, drip, drip leaching energy, joy, enthusiasm. Day after day after day. They say we moan about the weather here, and it’s true, and honestly, it’s warranted. By the time January and February roll around, the 4 months of successional grey are taking their toll. A glimpse of blue sky sends people into a frenzy. In December, it’s just the beginning, and I’m already desaturated, melting into the pale miasma, where everything is still and dark and boring, and I am boring too.
I read cosy blogs and magazines about hunkering down. Layers of blankets and flickering candles. Dark at 2pm and mugs of hot chocolate. I read about how we should embrace these winter months, how we should be nesting and cosy and warm and full of winter cheer. I watch videos of how to love winter, how to be aesthetic, how to get out in the daylight and make the most of it. I buy candles and arrange them nicely and light them and appreciate their little glow against the all consuming darkness. I wrap up warm and go for a walk and look upwards and see skies usually hidden by summer leaves and then get a coffee and wrap my hands around it and think, oh, this is okay.
But still my soul yearns for summer. For a glimpse of light past early afternoon. For some warmth in the sun. For green leaves and bare feet. For the hum of insects in the background. The endless grey brings cold, damp tendrils into my bones and sets a chill that lasts to April. It’s a long wait. Winter is stasis, longing, muted, gaping. No matter how much I know that this darkness sows seeds to grow come spring, I am not at home in these months. I’m miserable, cold, glaring wishfully at the thin pale sun that only just manages to creep along the top of the garden fence at the height of the day, before falling off below the horizon once more.
I sleep and sleep and sleep. Limbs heavy and weary. Pulled to a sort of half-hibernation, stocked up on crumble and custard, trying to wait it out. Nothing seems so tempting as falling asleep for the next 4 months, awakening with the first scent of hyacinths and fat buzz of bumbles as they emerge looking for food. I could embrace that life quite easily, I think, as I glare balefully at the grey cloud that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Again.
There is beauty in the bare skeletons of the trees, to be sure. The wonder as Jack Frost paints glittering fractals across car roofs. That crisp, deep, inky blackness of a clear winter sky, stars pricked out in diamonds, eons in our eyesight. But I’m a summer child, born in that heady June rush of energy, the longest days and wide expanses of summertime. I need it like oxygen.
I tried to convince myself to be cosy. I tried to embrace the dark nights, the crisp walks, the candles. But forcing didn’t work. It’s okay to grumble at leaden skies. It’s okay to grump around and shiver and narrow my eyes at the weather forecast (spoiler: it’s going to be grey). It’s ok to dedicate an entire blog post to how much you hate winter. Come solstice, I’ll be raising two fingers to the dark half of the year and waiting impatiently for the lengthening days.
Bring on the summer. Eventually….
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Wind in the Chimney
The hollow howl buffeting down the stone chimney tells me the winds have arrived. Ripping the last leaves from thin branches, whipping shadows through the dark windows where moonlight flashes briefly from behind scudding clouds. I love the sound, that almost boom, the dull echo as the air rattles down through the fireplace, squeezing through the grates, whistling and wheezing. That wild energy finding its way into the old house, as always.
There is a background roar down the valley, too. In the inky darkness, that deep, primal rumble as the gale winds career from valley side to valley side, funnelled around slalom corners formed by the hillsides and hitting our house head on. Wild nights. I need this.
I find it easy to slip into that world of deadlines, of work, of the relentless rejection of the academic treadmill. Old habits die hard and patterns repeat, but I can hold myself now, with the help of those around me who remind me that real life isn’t hours on the screen or judgement by unseen peers. It’s this gale, it’s the rain battering the window, its that wild energy finding its way through every crack and hole in old stone. It’s been a hard week for sure, and I feel myself sinking, sleeping, hiding away. But in darkness is always softness, in these four walls is sanctuary, in the out breath is healing and peace and centring. As the gale rages outside, I remember to let that wild wind find its way to me, too.
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Letting Go Friday
The absolute bin truck of emails arriving in my inbox tell me it’s Black Friday today. Although, they have been arriving for weeks so I can forgive myself for thinking it had already happened last week, and wondering if time had managed to rewind itself in some sort of horrific endless consumerist loop.
Luckily, today is still today. And prompted by the absolute excessive shouting to buy more or be more, I felt a need to sit quietly, with the rain lashing the windows outside, and to begin to let go of something, in a tiny, freeing protest.
That something ended up being my Bluesky accounts and a large percentage of Instagram follows. I felt a little jolt, a small renewal, to slip away from who the unnamed algorithm currently thinks I am and to start afresh. I can be whoever I want, as I click unfollow on lists after lists of accounts all very, very similar to each other, and that didn’t stand out in my memory. It’s quite fun gaming the algorithm. You can reinvent yourself every few months.
Over two accounts I culled 600 follows. I didn’t expect to feel so light, so happy, so free. Then, there was nothing to check, no new updates, no new stories (my downfall). So I made another cup of tea and stood outside and breathed real air in between the rain showers.
I thought as well of other things I can let go of, other things to breathe out into that icy air and let the wild winds carry away. For me, it’s been a time of endings and recalibrations in life recently. Big, identity-forming roles have finished terms, and the future is calling in a way that is dragging me forward, forcing shifts, different thinking, leaving comfort behind for brand-new possibilities. All with that undercurrent of fear, but a slight excitement, too. In all this, realisations peel away. People, places, parts of self – it’s time to say thank you for what they have served me with, and step on boldy without them. Who thought that clicking a button on social media a few hundred times would lead to something more.
It’s not that I can decide ‘right, it’s time to change’ and suddenly be a whole new person. Life just happens and we ride through it as best we can, and maybe in a few years, or ten, or twenty, we can look back and say oh, wow, I have changed since then. I learned. I experienced new knowing. I am still me, but ‘me’ doesn’t always to be static. For me, it feels like I add layers, shed layers, connect layers. Everything at once, through time and space.
But even if we can’t put our finger on specifics, I think we are aware of times of change. When something bigger is shifting. We may not know how or why, or what is on the other side, but I think we know when to listen to those signs beyond our explanation.
As winter draws closer, it’s a good time for a bit of pruning. To uncover bare bones and see what grows come spring.
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Deep fear and feeling
Wrapped in four different blankets, my hoodie pulled up over my thinning hair, I feel the thud thud thud of my heart deep within. Pumping oxygen to muscles primed to fight or flight, the whisper of shallow breath cooling my lips, pupils expanding in the dim light. But tonight is relaxed, a soft end to a weekend, a day off the following day, a cocoon of ambient lighting, deep bass, tea and company. Yet this insidious, deep, ever-present fear underlines every moment. Snaking its way up through my throat, a long, shaky exhale not enough to disperse the cortisol that’s been flooding this body for as long as I can remember.
Rationally, I don’t know what it is. That constant fear that I am In Trouble, that somehow I will get Found Out, but honestly, what for, I have no idea. For being wrong. For not being enough. For existing. For all this and more, the things I can’t put into words, things that are at most a fleeting sound, a glimpse, a shadow in the back of my mind. All the things that spoke truth to me, whilst I switched myself into whoever I was talking to at the time. A way to protect something that I have no name for.
Weirdly, the more I make peace with myself, the more this feeling seems to rise and start to stick around. I’m feeling the most confident, the most at peace that I have felt, maybe ever. And yet, simultaneously, I feel the most fear, too. The more I relax into myself, the more this thing inside me twists and turns and raises terror that has me screaming in my sleep. What is it, this deep fear? Am I creating space for it, the more I let go?
I think it needs to come out, whatever this anxiety is. It needs to be felt. This journey of final understanding, four decades in the making, has pushed and squashed fear down, leaving an underlying dread that coloured my days but that I thought was normal. I ignored it, I didn’t want to pay it attention. Now, letting go, expanding into myself, colouring in blankness, peeling back layers, existing in a sort of lightness – there is more space to hear. Bubbles rise to the surface, things long buried, things shouting to be heard. And so I let it expand, this deep fear, this beating heart. Monsters that chase me at night, a world that’s louder than I remember, an awareness that is highly alert for danger, for judgement, for discovery. I need to feel it, I know it. As unpleasant as it is, I think the smallness of life right now is a step forward.
My world has shrunk, as I’ve said before. But this time it is my world, and I’m real, and true, and tentative. This deep fear is keeping me small, and at the same time, keeping me safe. This shiny new me, uncovered, a small smile playing on lips, a new lightness of step. It has a purpose, and it deserves to be felt in all the panic, all the wide eyes and racing mind. The shaking hands, the deep, inexplicable terror. It hurts and it heals, little by little.
So, with curiosity, trepidation, and honestly a little resignation, I walk alongside the fear. To hear what was underneath all these years, to begin to understand and then to let it go. In all is waves. In all is a cycle. Seasons rise and fall, and this will fall too, in time.
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In all things
Samhain approaches, that time of held breath, liminality, not quite here but not quite there, either. A time where it is said that movement is easier between worlds, where permeability reigns, fluid, soft, grasping. Timeweavers dance across realities, journeys start and end from both sides of the veil. For those who listen, for those who speak a language that is never heard, for those who tiptoe into the night.
I think a lot about balance this time of year. Where everything has seemed either/or, it is now blurred. Surety is shifting and my mind feels it stronger than ever. For a brain where everything smudges together all of the time, coloured by layers of possibility and thumbprints scattered across synapses, this time of year is a time where I feel myself melt into the season, into the landscape. Into the energies that have carried me along this far.
I try and strive for balance, but balance is effort. It takes planning, muscle, tension to exist on that thin line between too much and not enough. Between light and dark. In the long, looping cycles of life, balance is always off. Save for a few pinpoints hit, in my experience, entirely by accident, I am always pulled one way or another. Immersed in joy, or immersed in apathy, or all of the minute divisions in between. Feeling each moment in my universe soul, with all parts of my being, beginning, end and the times that have no measure. Why should we strive to counter moments with their opposites? Why is the goal a perfect symmetry of experience?
The cycle of the year waxes and wanes with regularity, and I see the balance in light and dark, in summer and winter, in the eternal battle between oak and holly. But what for those who walk one side or the other? For those who are pulled by the deep, relentless energy of everything, everywhere. There is not just this, or that, or a perfect divide. Minds are messy, lives are messy. And mess is wonderful, relentless, and full of potential.
I’m embracing mess and the possibility that ‘unbalance’ is where I naturally come to rest. A mix of quiet and stimulation hasn’t really worked out for me. In fact, my mental rest is in doing, in movement, in beats and thrums. My brain sings to itself, and when left in silence creates its own relentless cacophony of colour, of half formed thoughts, feelings, glimpses and fizzing connection, as those who also belong to the tribe called ADHD will well attest. This year has brought introspection. It’s taken a while for things to settle but this year seems to have been the year of ‘what if’? And so, in celebration of this lightness of spirit, of this curiosity, just maybe, although the earth turns steadily, I entertain the idea of humming to a different frequency. A kind of weighted balance, one side rising higher than the other. Do I need to bring more balance into my life – or do I actually need less?
I’ve tried to incorporate more down-time this year, as university pressure mounts and my workload increases. But as much as I’ve embraced rest, internet-free time and stillness, I’ve not found myself feeling better. In fact, what seems to be helping is accepting the vibrancy that doing brings. I’m realising it’s not a balance between busyness and rest that helps me process and restore. It’s busyness…. and more busyness. Busyness in a different form. Tactile movement, creating, foraging, walking, making. Moving. Learning. Testing out just how much additional stimulation this ADHD brain needs to function optimally, and finding fun ways to embrace that. I’ve spent the last decade consciously making myself stop, slow, think and rest, sometimes forced by illness, sometimes in choice. A time of stillness to facilitate that deep, deep soul processing, and I needed it, viscerally, truly. Now I’m at a place where experimentation seems more achievable. And so, as the nights draw in, I feel this is actually a time for more. Where I’d usually be turning to hibernation, I feel drawn to exploration, instead. More, but different. Let’s see where it leads.
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Gardening and consistency
I love the garden, but I, and I am quite giddy with delight as I say this, I have come to realise I am not a fan of the actual gardening. Ha! What a journey, to be able to speak a realisation about myself. What a tentative delight it is!It should come as no surprise that I’ve battled with this, coming from a large family of green-fingered garden geniuses, resplendent in their piles of vegetables and home-grown preserves, borders of jewel-like flowers growing happily to the sky. I have tried, I really have. I love the idea of gardening. I want to love it, I really do. I’ve even almost convinced myself, whilst putting endless seeds in the soil, watering that little bit of hope that dark, cold days will soon pass and shoots will spill forth from the ground. But no. Inevitably, hardly anything sprouts. The things that do get eaten immediately by supersnails (even super-hot chillies, which only serve to make the snails grow stronger and more filled with rage and teeth). If something progresses to getting actually planted in the ground, it will, by some miracle of nature, become either grass or a dandelion. No, I don’t know how, either.
So, the last few years, as I have played with the dawning realisation that this is just not for me, I’ve let the garden just grow by itself, madly, wildly, full of weeds and yes, full of grass, full of dandelions, full of THINGS. I’ve embraced this funny, rising feeling of joy and freedom, until it spills from my lips in a wild giggle, watching shieldbugs lay eggs on a huge rambling rose that’s twined itself up the holly tree and yelling I DON’T CARE and feeling all kinds of wonderful. Because not caring has given something to the wild. Nature holds me now. The garden is its own beast.
I don’t care that couch grass is taking over the driveway. I don’t care that teasels spring from cracks in the paving, making bare-legged wandering a veritable gauntlet. I don’t care that the same teasels have created a huge, towering field for themselves in what used to be the veg patch. I don’t care that dandelions run rampant and brambles wander enthusiastically around the perimeter, eyeing up the rest of the garden with pure intent. Occasionally we’ll get a little enthusiastic and hack a path so the postie can still get through to the letterbox without being absorbed into a particularly enthusiastic clump of crocosmia. But in true metaphoric style, letting it all go has exploded into more than we ever imagined. The new, wild friends who have moved in to live in this little patch of space with us have shown us that this earth really knows best. “Stop interfering, let us get on with it!” shout the spiders spinning silk between teasel heads. “Thanks for the flowers!” buzz the fluffy bees, sharing nectar with wasps, flies, hoverflies and moths. Voles speedrun through the undergrowth. Frogs rustle in patches of wilderness.
Year by year, things come and go and rise and fall. Last year was borage, this year is teasels. Last year was foxes, this year, badgers. Giant dragonflies pop in over the fence, flitting their diamond wings and glistening all sorts of metallic colours. It’s great. The house becomes more and more permeable with time. Attic bees. Bats. Birds. Mice in the walls. Squirrels in the eaves. Moss. Ivy trying its very best to enter the windows and come and live indoors, thank you very much. Spiders living their dramatic, leggy lives in dark corners, and come August and September, at speed across the living room floor.
Instead of gardening, I wander around and pick things from the hedge that look tasty. Huge blackberries (fighting the nettles to get to the best ones). Wild strawberries, hiding under leaves tumbling from stone walls, super sweet and shiny red. Rosehips from the aforementioned climber, the angriest plant in the garden, seemingly putting specific effort into spiking your skin wherever possible. Boundless oregano, self-seeded and abundant. This is what I like. Dipping in and out, sharing the harvest with our wild friends.
I wondered why gardening is so hard. Looking back over my years of failed attempts, it seems kind of obvious now. Gardening takes consistency. It takes sustained effort. It takes planning and willpower and doing things for no immediate reward. You are definitely in it for the long haul. A lot of work, for a distant, future reward. All of these things are the exact opposite of how my brain works. No wonder I’m tapping out.
The big thing was that I felt like I should like gardening. Thousands of people find solace, support, community, meaning in tending a garden. I know myself that spending time here is healing. But there is also pressure for me. I tried and tried, and when my anxiety got really bad, even waiting until dark to run out to quickly try and do something in the garden whilst no one else was out. But I didn’t get better at gardening. I didn’t suddenly find a seam of joy, or a sense of relaxation. I didn’t get de-stressed, I got more stressed. The garden got ‘messier’ and I got more and more overwhelmed. Why couldn’t I do this?
It all makes sense now, to this brain built for rummaging hedgerows in autumn for the best berries, not for tilling and caring for those berries in the preceding months. This brain built for variety, quick interest and a little chaos, not planting plans, waiting for things to grow, and then remembering to plant them in bigger pots. It’s just not me. Maybe one day in the future some miracle will descend upon me and I’ll gaze at the garden in a golden haze of understanding, the joy of plantsmanship suddenly realised, planting whole crops of broad beans that never get rust or destroyed by hungry molluscs. Maybe one day I’ll actually be able to grow one entire flower from a seed. Or even from a plug and grow. Here’s hoping.
But for now, I just scatter care to the wind. It’s one of the first things I’ve solidly learned about myself, and being able to speak it out is such a thrill. From decades of not really knowing who I am, to being able to say I don’t think this is for me. Yes, I’ll shove a garlic in the ground and be surprised by it again come summer solstice. I might fling some bee mix at a patch of earth, give it precisely one watering can and cross my fingers. I might snip a particularly enthusiastic bramble now and again, or get into a fight with the angry rose bush. But that’s about it for me. I’m happy with that.
Like I say, maybe it’ll change in the future. I’ve grown things before, in a rented house with lovely soil and a proper veg patch, and loved eating beetroot straight from the ground, growing a cabbage bigger than the sink and picking bowl after bowl of warm, ripe strawberries. Someone else had spent years improving the soil. Someone else planted the strawberry patch. A gardener was included with the rent to tidy up and sort the lawn. Left to myself, I fully imagine that huge lawn would have taken on a wild tinge, too. So we will see. For now, I’ll wander on into the wilderness, and see what next year holds.
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And we are all waiting
The dusk air is dead still. That silence where the leaves wait in absolute inertia, where the air is so thick you can feel yourself moving through it. Even the usual valley noises sound flat, deadened, muted. I am waiting. We are all waiting. The anticipation is almost oppressive. There is not even a hint of breeze. The branches of birch and willow hang dead weight in the fading light. There is a magick in the air that I can’t name, can’t define, but I can almost taste it.
I move slowly, lightly, tiptoe on the few fallen leaves that hint of autumn hiding just around the corner. I breathe quietly, eyes adjusting as darkness sweeps a blanket over the land. A bat flits silently above and I can almost see the trail it leaves in the air. I breathe the stillness deep into my lungs, the taste of night, damp, woody, dark, filling. The sweetness of summer tinged with the bark-notes of early autumn, tangy over my tongue. And still we wait.
I close the door, softly, softly. Inky blackness closes over the window panes, interspersed with familiar lights twinkling from the opposite valley side. Even inside, there is stillness. The fridge hums, low and constant. Outside, the air wraps itself around the stone walls, around flowers glowing in the darkness, around moths, around feathered night hunters perched in high branches, awaiting any small movement in the grasses below. We still. For what, I am unsure. But under my feet, deep in that place where knowing is absolute yet touch is impossible, I feel the silent arrival of something new. A new season, a fading of high summer, smudging together, passing a pin-point and tipping ever forwards. The dawn brings a new breath.
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Shrinking
My world is small these days. The long commutes and drives, the exploration, the excitement for new places and new things faded away, as over a decade or so an anxiety and dread grew stronger with every passing year. I’ve watched as long commutes were replaced by shorter journeys. Long wanders from the front door were replaced by driving to the wild moors, away from people. The contraction accelerated in recent years. Panic in familiar places. Dread of driving. Inability to go outside in the garden when neighbours were in theirs. An all-consuming anxiety. The grass grew long and I imprisoned myself, pacing, restless, missing the wild freedom I needed, sitting instead on the sofa in our dark stone house, relentlessly scrolling. Hoping to escape via a screen into a world that was just outside my window. I grew quiet. I grew numb. The last year, even the moorland faded from my reach. My car broken, anxiety too great to catch a bus. Cancelled and ignored plans. An invisible forcefield across the driveway gate that I just could not cross. After a long retreat of the tide, over all the years, I had finally reached a singularity. Stasis. Immoveable.
I fought and fought it but it still consumed me. Some deep, primal fear of perception, of judgement, a need for invisibility, a rage against all I used to do and just could not propel myself to do any more. I wanted to escape reality and scrolled incessantly. Screaming in silence, in under-stimulation, a prison of forced apathy for this neurodivergent brain.
But amongst it, finally, I started to find compassion. A small spark where I thought it would never end. Eventual beginnings of neurodivergent understanding took a while to land, initially numb, then growing, seismic pulses reaching back over the decades. I lay still and I felt them wash over me, colouring childhood memories with understanding, filling in blanks across these forty-plus years. A delayed grief for the death of my dad, layers upon layers of confusion, questions, slowly softened by the man who appears in my dreams, finally whole and here. The instability of the pandemic, the raw anger that still ricochets through us all, the pain, mass trauma, but business as usual. The ghostly imprint of a distant job that left me shell-shocked, with flashbacks, nightmares and avoidance that continue to this day, whilst huge chunks of that time are missing from memory. This body has felt it all. This body still feels it all. This body needed to still, and process, and hide away for a while. Perhaps this was its way. Perhaps this was needed. In stillness, I began to work through it all, relentlessly, fiercely and deeply supported by my husband, my only safe place, the person who helps me come back from it all, always. Contained in these four walls, a beginning, and an end.
So I continue my tiny, comfortable journeys – to university, to the shop, occasionally for a coffee in the neighbouring village. Familiar visits for holidays. Tiny movements. The moors wait, visible from where I sit in the garden, proud that I can hear a neighbours’ party and still sit outside, something I would have hidden from a few months ago. The difference now is that I know I will walk them again. The momentum is building, swelling, quietly but strong. This forty-second year is teaching me, and I am learning anew. A new understanding and trust that my world will expand again once more, in time. Tentatively feeling into my brain, into my soul, slowly discovering how to act on the things buried within. Enjoying bubbles of colour rising to the surface, long buried under layers of being countless versions of someone who was never actually myself. With this, the anxiety is receding. My soul, strengthening, not as afraid to be seen these days. The curiosity and hum of life pulling me back.
With my little broken car booked into a garage, I hope small wheels will soon carry me in return to those familiar places. Revisiting spirits of stream, grass and rock. Fingers tracing leaf fossils older than the land on which we walk. A slow re-immersion, a new season of exploration, following deer-trods and footprints once more. This anxiety, this shrinking has taught me much. How much I value the wild expanses and deserted moorlands. How much I need to feel wind on my skin, to breathe sharply in ice-cold water, to follow colours and move my body and drown in sounds. To explore this land, create familiarity once more. This house has held me, even when I felt the walls were closing in around me, and I look at it with new eyes. The jumbly, messy garden with its riot of life living here with us. The stone walls, once under oceans, permeable, providing shelter for us alongside a cacophony of other life existing on this little patch of land, in this minute sliver of time.
The deep knowledge that everything moves in cycles. My deep thaw is starting, even as the season turns to autumn here. Maybe this is my planting time, those few months before Samhain. New beginnings. New paths to tread. Slowly, I step outside the gate.