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Imbolc, momentum and the clearing of the grey
It’s Imbolc and the 784 days of January are finally over. The flu has finally departed, aided by copious amounts of sleep, paracetamol and wonderful care packages from lovely friends. The endless blanket of grey cloud, damp, miserable and all-pervading has started to shift, with the wan sun peeking through and hope on the horizon.
Sleep, my goodness I have slept. But in winter, this hibernation, I tried not to fight it this year and am averaging a good 10 hours per night. I need it. Healing darkness, slow recovery, and expanding out into the January gloom. And as I slept, the world quietly moves on under my feet. The first sunny day for weeks and we finally ventured outside to the moors, faces turned to sunlight and surprise at bulbs breaking the surface. Whilst we’re still and resting, the world still turns.
The Hellebore is tentatively out, a few small flowers blooming amongst the stiff brown twigs of winter. Goldfinches pick through the mass of teasels. Teeny shoots of green poke up in random flowerpots. I can’t remember what grows in any of them and spring always brings a nice surprise! I can’t wait for that huge, heady, energetic rush of late spring. But for now, I sense that tipping point approaching. It’s still a season for rest. But seeds can be planted, physical or metaphorical. There is movement on the horizon, finally. And soon, summer!
There’s a sense of a shift as we potter about our daily lives. We’ve taken electricals to the local repair café to be fixed, we’ve painted and moved furniture and I’ve even started some university work I’ve been stuck on for 3 months. A bit of momentum building, maybe, after a year adrift. I’m not sure if 2025 was like that for everyone, speeding by so quickly it hardly registered as a full year. I think that pandemic processing is catching up. Things aren’t quite right yet, but there is hope they will be again.
The clouds reveal a glimpse of blue sky above. Spring is in the air!
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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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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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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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Maybe it will all be ok
I feel as though my whole life was building up to this. Nothing special, nothing momentous. No news, no occasion. Just a hint of knowing, of acceptance, a beginning in this middle life.
I turned 42 this summer. A true mid-life age, but I feel everything else was a beginning, a prelude. Wild rides, highs and lows, not knowing who I am, swimming through decades. But it is here I am starting to come ashore. Two-score and two. That many years to begin to say, I am her, I like that, I am good at this. To expand into a body and soul more solid than it has ever felt before. To voice that which I didn’t dare before. To feel tentative joy in experience. To watch the glitter of that August-dry grass in the breeze and feel that same sway in the wind, the joy of movement, the embrace of my place in the web of it all.
My hair is falling out in clumps, probably hormones, probably the final year of the PhD, but with the shedding comes a thought of letting go, of leaving those memories locked in keratin and colour behind. Hanging from branches, pulled from hairbrushes, carried away in water flow. I keep a lock, pandemic hair, curled in a small basket, waiting for some magick to show itself, the time to be right to throw it to the wind or sea, or maybe stay with dark earth in silence. Tiny, silver-white hairs begin to regrow in place of long, red strands. I stare at them in amazement, wonder that I got this far, the emergence of a new chapter. Older me squeezes the hand of my younger self somewhere in another dimension of my mind, a few layers deep. She is healing, slowly, slowly. She is beginning to see the path. Neither of us know where we tread in coming years, but we get there, together.
That peach August sun picks out diamonds in the parched grasses surrounding the garden. The flags glow warm underfoot, skin sinking deliciously into the heat. The breeze tickles branches, glorious days. Rosehips glow red, blackberries shine that deep purple-black in the hedge. Harvest is early, this year, pushed by the heat of this dry, bright summer. These are my days, tiptoe-long and layered. Now I allow myself to stretch deep into the multi-layered love of the season, embracing the true depth of feeling for maybe the first time. Not just love for the long days, but each feeling is faceted, past and future, place and expansion, light and dark, what is and will be. Layers and layers, as always.
Two-score and two. The August exhale, the ripening of a harvest sown unknowingly all those years ago, fighting tooth and nail against storms, against identity, against myself. Now, as age spots and wrinkles begin to adorn my skin, I am beginning to understand. With each white hair, I feel love. With each darker spot on my hands, I smile. With new lines on my face, I gaze in wonder. It took a while to get here, but I wouldn’t change it. 42, but I feel I may begin to know myself for the first time ever. I am still discovering, settling, testing. But it feels different. In place of dread, a hint of a smile plays on my lips. Maybe it will all be ok.
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Wild winds
There’s an August storm whipping through the trees outside. Trunks bending, branches flailing wildly in the gales. The leaves are heavy, and the ground moves up and down with the gusts like waves. Plant pots tip and debris piles in corners. I leave it until the winds settle.
There are two small casualties of the storm, baby wood pigeons blown from the nest, sad little bodies in the rain, thin yellow feathers on cold skin. My heart hurts for them, and I carry them over the wall to a sheltered spot, scattering rose petals on their tiny wings. May they be used well, feeding new life, absorbed back into that interconnected web of which we all are part. A candle flickers for them now, as darkness falls. It is nature, and baby birds a precarious part of that, but we watched the parents pick twigs from our roof, spending time getting just the right ones, and I feel a wrench of sadness at the end of this nest for the year.
The wind is strong but warm, and runs through my hair like fingers when I turn my face to the gale. Usually I’d be up on the moors, running wild in the storm, but this year and the last I feel more of a pull to stay home. It is a quiet period for me, a conserving of energy, the slow times. It is what it is. Instead I read, and potter, and do some mundane household bits, whilst the rain batters the windows and the trees are shaped by wind-wraiths. There is a freshness to this wind, a clear smell, a cleansing. It wraps around the stone walls of the house, brushing away any lingering stagnancy, invigorating, clarifying. With our week away it seems all the cellar spiders in the world have moved in, and the house is expectant, cloying, waiting. It needs this movement, this autumn clean. I clean the inside, slowly, chaotically, opening windows to refresh stale air. The wind joins me, and together we revive these four stone walls.
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Lughnasadh, harvests and back to reality
We spent Lughnasadh week in Anglesey on our annual family holiday. The quiet, wild cove was now thrumming with people, the car park rammed, the watersports in full flow. Boats tacking across the bay, sails full, avoiding paddleboards and kite surfers. Cricket, sandcastles, coolboxes and camping chairs filled the sand. Land Rovers inching down the tight lane, meeting tractors on blind bends, figuring out logistics and passing places. Amongst this, we swam in freezing seas, trading jokes with those whizzing past, floating on the tide, gazing at the skies and fighter jets above, a small bubble amongst it all. Amongst all the noise and busyness, this place holds me. Something in my bones, in soul and cells. The ancient rock is solid beneath my feet, no matter the transience of life on the surface. The whip of wind through reeds, the cry of buzzards circling above, the quiet splosh as small waves tip over into breakers along the sand. The silence in between the noise. The settling into familiar days.
We visited standing stones and listened, the deep time pulse, the footsteps of thousands passing through. Exchanging smiles with those visiting for the same reasons, for a wisdom beyond us all, some feeling the pull to step through the doorway between, to whatever greets us on the other side. To let go, to start fresh, to weave time. On Lughnasadh eve, we stood in silence deep in Bryn Celli Ddu, as every year, hands on the stone and souls with those older than us. Earth in our lungs, roots from our feet, damp on our skin. The wheel inches ever forward.
And forward indeed, it has turned. We returned to brown, crispy teasels where just a week ago they were green, purple and full of bees. Leaves overtaken by powder mildew, the dry weather taking its toll. Brown edges creeping in with a sense of heaviness in the garden. A dullness, a long fatigue. Leaves pull down branches, apples ripening, blackberries glistening in the hedges. The red glow of haws, the deep black of sloes, the promise of a fruitfulness to gather and preserve for the long months on the horizon. I’m tired, at this time. The long exhale of summer is almost over. It is time to rest a little, before the harvest.
I wonder to myself what I am harvesting this year. Last year, I felt slowness, acceptance, seeds of understanding starting to ripen. This year, I feel it’s a second-year crop, building on those first tentative harvests, getting stronger, adapting. I haven’t tried to work on anything this year. I realised there is a constant push for ‘improvement’, or linear progress, like we should always be striving for something, striving to change ourselves, always working on a thing that shows that we are never quite enough, whatever that means. I finally stopped, and I’m just floating for a while, like in the salt water. I wanted to feel enough. I wanted to start to hear myself, for the first time. I didn’t know what I would learn, if anything, but I know earth is below, and sky is above, and it all holds me gently. I know wind brings whispers and water flows from source to sea, changing form, in multiple states. I know silence brings answers, tiny, quiet, but there, if we learn how to listen. So my harvest isn’t a field of corn, or a bushel of apples. It’s one or two plump blackberries, plucked from the hedgerow. A nut, brown and crunchy, ripening amongst others on hazel or walnut. A quiet harvest. A just-enough harvest. A forager’s harvest, not a farmer’s.
I’ve felt as though I’m waiting for something, but now I realise it isn’t quite that. Is waiting linear? To expand into non-linearity is something different, more of a curiosity, rather than the expectation of something coming to pull us ever forwards. Multiple layers, simultaneously forwards and backwards and left and right. There’s comfort in that, myself and my undefined blob of space-time, floating for now, circling in an eddy. Maybe soon, I’ll catch the river flow again, but for now, it’s enough. It’s a quiet time, and I realise now I need this to process, to catch up with myself, to let myself sift through the experiences of the last few weeks. I feel the need to be at home, tidying, doing easy tasks, with that processing going on in the background. Then it’ll be time again to dive in. Like the tide, ever changing but still continuous.
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Rise and fall
It is late July, but this morning there is the faintest tang of autumn on the breeze. Warm and humid, but the blackberries are plump and ripe, and grey clouds blanket the valley today. The bees are busily working their way through the teasel heads, scattering those slim purple petals like confetti into the pools of clear water collected in the leaves below.
The leaves are dusky, lush, faded green now, settling into the season, easy on the eyes. Summer feels slower, chilled out, breathing gently, luxuriating and comfortable. The heady rush of solstice is a distant memory, that tightly wound feeling and energy rush expended. I echo that slowing in recent days. A few long-term projects received their final intense push, completed, and now the out-breath. A time of heavy workload is somehow completed, words written, chapters closed off. New things raise their heads, vying to fill that new empty space, but somehow the urgency is gone and I feel I can take time in decisions, which is a new feeling for me. A new chapter of thinking, considering, and synthesis calls in my PhD work, mirroring the season. Lengthening time. Slow consideration. Time to digest. An active type of resting.
I find this helps with tough problems. Sometimes I get to the point where I feel I can’t push my brain any more. I’ve learnt over the last few years that stopping trying to actively think about a problem actually gives my brain the space to process it. Doing something different, taking away the focus, and letting my brain get on with it itself, with no conscious interference. Mostly, the answer will pop up by itself in a few days or weeks. I’ve been trying to leverage this, reading around, filling my brain with data, potential solutions, then taking the focus away and hoping the soup will simmer down to something clear. So far, it’s worked well – that trust and understanding in how my brain works is an ongoing curiosity. I know the answer will come, soon enough. I’ll ride the wave when it does.
For now, though, I settle into the languid season. My work slows but ticks over, attention to different aspects, brain filtering things in the background. I’m actually really enjoying my PhD right now, the whole writing up process, and I don’t want to set it down completely. I need to ride the momentum whilst it exists. As in all things, there are waves. Times of intensity, times of release, times of processing, times of building. The common advice of consistent, sustained effort doesn’t work for me, although it does for some. Routine, especially enforced routine, isn’t how my mind responds best. Or at all! But this flow, this seasonal rhythm, it carries me along with it with less resistance. A few pebbles in the stream, maybe, things that have to be done. But generally, listening to the rise and fall, it reminds me I’m held in the seasons. All part of the same, rush and rest, inhale and exhale, summer and winter. Everything is a cycle, even work, even thoughts. And we all breathe together.
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Breathing Out
Solstice has come and gone, with that heady rush and energy that build and builds in the days beforehand. The stillness, the dusk and light and dusk and light of that peak pause, where breath is held, eyes wide, hands stretched out into the infinite space that seems to surround us at midsummer. A light that never turns to night. A feeling of endless possibility. Sometimes it feels too much, even. But wonderful, wonderful.
Now, a few weeks later, that tightness is loosening. That breath held cooped up in lungs that felt too small at the time is exhaled. We soften, slow a little, and relax into the colours of summer proper. The leaves lose their shine and become more matte, more muted. Grass and crops turn yellow gold. The insects living alongside us buzz busily into the dusk.
I’ve had a break from writing, to concentrate on finishing my PhD, to head my health in a better direction, and to just process the last few years. It’s been beneficial to step back from here for a while, leaving the cobwebs to gather and words to settle and fade. But in all things, as always, the tide ebbs and flows. I feel the pull back here once more. In the slow times over winter, I had time to think. To stop pushing and rushing.
So, I extended my studies by a year to give myself time to breathe. In creating space by stepping back from here, I filled that gap with more busy-ness that now, in this pause-time, I realise wasn’t for me at all. So, once more we begin. I call for endless learning, the embracing of curiosity, and the inspiration of the seasons. It’s ok to wander, to try, to hold close and let go. Seasons fill with energy, then change. It all repeats. Things come and go, and it’s all ok. As summer stretches out, languid and light, I hear its call. Wander on, to that midnight light on the horizon and the stretching of the dawn.
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Winter, Hibernation and Answers in the Dark
Winter, Hibernation and Answers in the Dark
As the days darken and the leaves fall slowly to the ground, we slow. As those crisp autumn colours mute and fade to that deep brown, tinged with those sparkling diamonds of frost, it is time to settle. As deadlines ramp up before the winter holidays, as shops open longer and fill themselves with bright colours, listen to that quiet pull in the opposite direction. To sit on freezing ground, to breathe in thin, sharp air, and feel the insistent tug towards the dark. Peeling layers away, finding truth hiding in that instinctual part of ourselves, that quiet tide of back and forth, back and forth that roots us with a strength beyond knowledge. To walk the way of the old ones. To let go and wait for the warmth to return, in months ahead, with the deep knowledge that it will, as always. The circle in all. So for now, we still.
The darkness is the beginning and the end. For now, listen and slow and gather the last. The space and silence to review, to bury seeds deep in loam, to breathe out and let go and trust in the future of those small shoots. Be as the trees, letting leaves fall to nourish new growth in spring.
I make tincture from berries gathered in autumn, to see through the darker months. I leave jars of water out in moonlight, and dance in the falling Birch seeds that carpet the ground like snowfall, revelling in the quiet pitter patter as they drop from drooping branches, as my friend Birch settles into winter, too, silver bark echoing the moonlight illuminating the valley. I slow and sleep and settle. It has not always been easy, fighting the unrelenting consumer season, the workload, the part of me that wants to exist solely in the highs of summer. But there are answers in the dark, and to hear them, I must follow those old footprints across frozen moorland, deep into earthy forests where secrets are whispered on the freezing winds.
As the last leaves fall from the trees we live alongside, I know a few things I need to lay down alongside them. To let myself breathe. To loosen the grip on relentless pursuit, and listen instead. To watch, and ask, and hear the answers. To let things just be, to follow curiosity, to accept. And so, I lay these things in the falling leaves, to rot, to transform, to bring nourishment in future times.
So for now, the blog silences as I work on finishing my PhD. To hide and hibernate as a seed in the loam, to return when my brain has capacity. I bury this space, this potential, and wait. Soon, it will grow again. A leaf, to earth, to roots, to those small buds of spring. The wheel will turn.