Imbolc has come and gone, as has January. I spent a day lighting fires and watching them burn out again with a lovely bunch of women in the woods. We sang and listened and laughed, and spent time considering the winters time of reflection and intentions for the coming spring. We made walnut shell, beeswax candles and floated them in water as the sunset on a winter’s day.
I’ve had meetings and ideas for potential projects with various people and places. I remind myself that the winter is a time for preparation and readiness rather than action, doing and flourishing. So when I feel like not much is occurring, I know that it’s ok. Planning and preparing are valuable things to do.
I plant out an ash and oak tree that have been stifled in pots on the patio for year. I bodge some deer proofing and mulch the base of them, so hope that there will be no munching of buds and leaves to further stifle them. I hope this will be the start of a Forest garden. It’ll take my lifetime, but that’s part of the nature of tree life. It sits in a different time span to ours.
I have a moment of joy and accomplishment as the sister and I complete some grown-up paperwork and send it off to Companies House to set up our CIC.
I prepare a packed lunch for a day in someone else’s woods. I’ve managed to get a day’s work covering absence at a Forest School setting not so far from here. There’s a pirate ship and all sorts of wonderous exploring to do and small people to meet and play with.
And as I see a glimmer of a sunrise at coffee making time, I finally remove the Christmas lights from the kitchen. The days are turning. The small people yearn for snow after looking through old photos of today a year, two years and three years ago. There’s no sign of that on our particular horizon, but there is a bit of light and brightness to start our week and our February together.