We’re in the deep midwinter, the season of turning towards the light in hope—Chanukah began at sunset on 18th, it’s Solstice today as I write and Christmas on Sunday—festivals in which the hard times are set against the blessings that persist and those to come. In my forest garden, the apple trees have been the […]
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Writing the bleak midwinter into light
We are approaching the midwinter. It’s a time to hibernate, a time for rest and restoration, a time for going inward so that new seeds can germinate. Winter may be cold (as I write I’m wrapped in shirt, jumper and extra cardigan, topped with a thick dressing gown, wool beret and fingerless gloves) but it […]
Writing our longing and loss into beauty
For many, today marks the first Sunday in Advent, and, whatever our faith or none, experiences of longing, expectation and hope are common to all of us. This is how the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi campaigner, executed just two weeks before the concentration camp he was held in was liberated, puts it: The celebration […]
Writing as we listen
It’s the middle of November, the last weeks of another year of extreme weather, fires, floods, the lingering threats of Covid, wars and rumours of wars… Less than two weeks ago I was in Paris for Samhain with unseasonal temperatures in the mid-twenties. Now I’m beginning to look forward to the first Christmas in three […]
Writing the seasons of grief
We live in a culture that is not good at dealing with grief, a culture that often finds loss too much to handle. And yet the world is a constant cycle of loss and gain, of death and life. Every year, every season, every day we have profound and compelling metaphors of change, love and […]
Writing the journey – forward and back
One of the things I love about the meditation practice of yoga nidrā is how it changes my perception of time. Within the meditation I lose the normal sense of chronos, seconds ticking away, and find time goes both rapidly and extremely slowly. And I also find that time loops, as it does in dreams. […]