Last week, I started with song titles. One lyric that always calls out at this time of year is Lennon's So this is Christmas and what have you done? Another year over…
It demands an answer. And as many times as I started trawling back through the things I've written this last year, just as many times did I lose interest in revisiting them. Whatever has happened this year, whatever I have done or failed to do, whoever has come into my life or left it, all of those things matter (to me) only in so much as they continue to influence what happens now and next.
I've been heading these musings with the word 'Christmas' but everyone who knows me knows that the Winter Solstice is my festival of choice. This is my pivot point for the year, the ending of the old, the ushering in of the new, the turning.
In the past I have supported my marking of the festival with embedded rituals. This year was different. The way I celebrated the solstice was different to recent years and very much in keeping with what has shifted during the year.
2021 has been a year of “finally” letting go of many things that have kept me anchored in the past. I use the word anchored, though mired is a better one. An anchor is a chosen thing, the mire is a clinging thing.
When I spoke of trying to move forward, my friend echoed my own thoughts when he said: it's like you're trying to climb out of the pool but someone has still got hold of your ankle. And that's how it was. I have been very certain of my need to move in other directions and yet I kept allowing myself to be pulled back into who I used to be.
When that analogy put it so succinctly, I realised that it was just a matter of having to kick harder: to be determined that the pool of the past was no longer where I wanted to live. In many respects it is a beautiful pool, and it holds treasured memories, but even so, there is journeying still to do. I'm finally climbing out of the mire.
The insight that followed quickly on the heels of that one was that there is also a time for letting go of rituals. Not of “ritual” per se – I deeply hold to the importance of ritual in our lives – but of individual practices, that have served us well, but have served their time. Sometimes our honouring of what has gone before, is what keeps us from stepping to embrace what is to come.
The importance of ritual is in the meaning that it holds and I have discovered that there are points in our lives where the "meaning" itself may need to be allowed to shift.
Of all the days in the year, the Winter Solstice is the one I imbue with meaning. It is the day when my rituals matter most. The turning of the year. The shift back from growing darkness into growing light. The evocation of the cyclical nature of seasons and of life. It is my time for connecting myself to the planet in its wintering, in its calming, in its taking time to reflect and regenerate.
I believe that we are designed to hibernate. To retreat into our winter caves and gather round fires and tell stories and live off the harvest – the actual gathered in fruitfulness and the harvest of our learning from the year just ending, the gathering in of our experience. It is a time for sharing.
I had my ways of honouring this. And this year, I let them go. My two core rituals of years past, were things that I did not do this year.
And the day was still beautiful. Perhaps more so.
And I still felt the turning of the year from the old into the new. Perhaps more so.
I did other things this year.
I got up early to join a group of amazing women writers, who tune into each other and into their inspiration and their creativity as a Tuesday morning "thing". Can I call it a ritual? No, not really. It is a space. A curated and created space. It is a free space. We simply come together to hold space for each other and to write. It is the space in which we give ourselves permission to pick up our pens and let them lead us.
Oh, but it is already deliciously laced with home-grown rituals. We start with a grounding. We end with a blessing. We spend a magic 7 minutes responding to a prompt and then we give ourselves a precious hour in which to simply write. To write simply, or complicatedly. To write freely or to an agenda. To journal, to work, to edit, to be poets or business-women or authors or songwriters or story-tellers or memoirists or biographers. To write. To steal an hour or so a week, to sit with other women and write. We don't share very much of what we've written, it's not that kind of writing group. We share how it has been to write. Or sometimes, to not write. We share how we are in our lives.
It is a beautiful space, and if anyone is reading this who is part of it, you will know who you are and how important you have already become in my life. If you're reading this and you write, let me know, we can always make space, hold space, for more of the divine feminine spilling onto the page.
So yes, this solstice day I got up early and wrote. In the midst of it, just after 8a.m. (GMT) I went outside into the garden to see the midwinter sunrise. I stood barefoot on the earth, cold wet grass beneath my feet, and a heavy blanket sky above my head. I trusted that the sun rose on cue. All I saw was a hardly perceptible lightening of the cloud.
Then I journalled: Is the dawn any less beautiful for arriving shrouded? Is the day any less new for not being born in glorious hues of pink and gold? Crows settle in my dawn trees, the ones behind which the sun makes its appearance on those days when I get to see it. The dark birds settle and look to the east, watching too. But then the blackbirds arrive at my feet, chattering, asking to be fed.
I accede and they chirrup their thanks for mealworms and suet and seeds.
I step back inside, into the warm and pick up my pen to celebrate the ordinary. I have not been writing much of late, wondering what it is I might still have to say, and perhaps it is still this: celebrate the ordinary. We spend so much time seeking out the special, we forget the specialness of everything. I remember that I have no need to live an extraordinary life, because the magic and the miracles are in the work-a-day normal. Magic can be found as deeply in a cloudy sky as in a clear one; it whispers to us through the cacophonous days just as it sings on the silent ones. It flows from my pen when I get out of the way and stop trying to create.
The magic simply shimmers in waiting to be discovered. As do we all, in our own magic and mystery.
The writing space was full of love. Some of our fellows are suffering, others are nurturing loved ones. We welcomed them into the space and they gifted us with the beauty of their wanting to be there even when there is nothing to be written.
A wise woman once said that love is not a feeling, it is an action. Love is not something we feel, it is something we do. Sometimes I think that love might also be a space, an imagined blanket that we throw around those who need it. Love is warmth, and strength, and encouragement. And sometimes – like this morning – it can be felt even though we do not know that we are sending it. I love that!
And all of this before breakfast!
The rest of the day went it's own way and I learned that some days are all the better for their unexpectedness.
I had sort of assumed that we would go up to the coast, and we did, via Buildbase to acquire some blocks upon which to rest the newly sanded railway sleepers, upon which to stand my birthday present gallery board in the beach hut. I’m sure that my displays will get damp and curl and fall off the board – but that’s part of the hut-ness of it all. The display will evolve and change and reflect the whole thing-y-ness of what this space is to me. The whole edifice is quirky and unfinished and (to my eyes) utterly beautiful. It has grown out of my very simple could you make me a notice board? It calls for more stones and driftwood and found objects. And I am delighted by it.
On the drive up, I was asked whether we were heading to Sheringham or Cromer. I was puzzled, and said, well, Cromer I’m thinking, because... And he interjected...yes, Cromer,because that’s where your hut is. I didn’t ask if he was thinking about the scatter site. Bless him for doing so, if he was, but I had no call to go there. Clive is all along that coast and way beyond by now. And the seagulls still fly in salute. He doesn’t need me to be morbid at the turn of the year.
I seem to have abandoned my ritual prayer release as well.
It has been a year of ‘finally’ letting go of so much. And the day of the solstice turned out to be a day of beginning to embrace what is coming in.
Watching my friend smoothing the wood, which looked to be such a meditative thing, I felt I was intruding and left him to it. To a large extent, I also allowed him to decide what this structure was going to look like. His eye is better than mine for such things. The more I look at the result, the more I love it. It is not quite an altar, but is something of an edifice. It reminds me of a hearth and if I had any painterly ability I'd be drawing flames on the wall. I don't, so instead I will await driftwood and flotsam and jetsam. I'll walk the winter beaches and see what calls to me.
~
Way back in 2020 when the world was weird some church folk in Overstrand created a labyrinth on the beach to honour the first of the covid dead. And from there it grew into a way to connect spiritually for those who could not enter their churches. The labyrinths were deliberately drawn on the beach as part of the symbolism of impermanence. They spawned workshops and an exhibition that sadly I never got around to seeing. There was talk of a possible poetry workshop linked to it, but life got in the way. It wasn’t meant to be.
Only for me, clearly it was, because on Tuesday I got to walk barefoot on the sand, on this day of all days. Wordless. Holding the question as I do, walking to centre; listening for the answer as I walk out again. A ritual.
On a day when old rituals were let go, here was a new one crafted and waiting for me, because as we walked along the beach, we stumbled upon such spiral drawing.
My shall we go and investigate? was a little ingenuous – of course I was itching to take off my shoes and walk into it. There was no way in which that was going to not happen.
Scarved and gloved and sweat-shirted and down-jacketed, but barefoot, in I strolled. We all walk these things the way we walk them, our own way. Children run them, energetically, but by the rules. Teenagers stomp sulkily across them. Some stop and pick up stones. I hold my question lightly as I walk mindfully inwards towards the centre, and then listen for the answer as I walk equally open-mindedly out again.
All of that was below the surface on this day. All I really remember is the cold sand beneath my feet and smiling, and catching him talking to the lady who’d drawn it out, learning about the point of it all.
I'm not sure I even had a clear question this time. The answer I heard was: This! Stop listening, and look!
The beach, the waters, the sky, the hut, us, friends, strangers, connection, peace.
Then I stood and waited while he walked his own spiral. Differently to the way I had walked mine, which is also part of the beauty.
Then we walked further east along the beach. Pond hopping on the low tide. Stone gathering. Breathing in the sea air. There were seals in-shore, bobbing among the waves and diving under whenever he called to them. There were dogs who were more responsive, including a one-eyed spaniel.
On the way back into the city we drove up onto Mousehold Heath in the hope of a sunset. The sun set as it had risen, behind the grey bank of cloud.
We shared food. We listened to music. Later I drank champagne and picked up my pen again.
A beautiful day.
At the end of it I responded to an email asking me how I felt…
How I am in this moment is full of love for all the beautiful people who have come into my life this year, and for those who were already here and chose to stay.
How I am in this moment is deeply grateful for this amazing world and my place in it.
How I am in this moment is joyful, remembering my personal dance last night in the moonlight, out on the deck with a rope in my hands and candles on the back step.
How I am is feeling the spirit that I connected with walking an unexpected beach labyrinth, barefoot, this afternoon, to the gentle sound of waves, and dogs, and children – a dance in slow motion. Stillness in movement.
How I am at this turning of the year is peaceful, happy, grateful: deeply content to be me.
However you are feeling at this mid-way point of the prolonged festival we indulge in these days to mark the turning of the year, and whatever bits of it have inherited- or imposed-expectation for you, I gently suggest that maybe you find your own pivot point - be it the solstice, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, or some entirely different day of the year (your name-day, your birth-day, the day you started school, whatever) and choose to find your own meaning in it, create your own rituals. May they bring you peace and a start to the next round of seasons that is full of curiosity and joy.
Go gently, be happy.
