It's approaching Imbolc - marking the transition out of winter into spring, and I can feel spring beginning to whisper. But I'm also in hibernation mode still - some part of me wants to be folded into the earth for winter, to slow my breathing down, to still my body, and like a dormant rhizome just hold all the promise of summer and blooming and pollination in the dreaming, and let the earth hold me, all of last years fallen leaves composting down and the microbes and worms and mycelium doing their sacred work of taking death and turning it into life.
So I've been slower breathing for sure. Producing much less, wanting to metaphorically (and sometimes literally) sleep. But I've just gently been tending to a new website. My old one has been singing of the old stuff that I've made, but not even murmured of what I've been making and dreaming in the last three years. So I've been quietly drawing together all the new things and some of the old and reshaping what it all looks like, so that it speaks a bit more authentically.
Last weekend we were under snow, the first reasonable fall of the winter, becoming rarer these days, an echo of retreating glaciers. And today I was out in short sleeves in a field, picking stones off rows of undug soil that had risen in the snowmelt, in preparation for planting, watching crocuses and snowdrops and daffodils putting up foliage and the occasional flowerhead.
The seasons carry us. Winter is not over yet, but spring is not far away.
