I do hibernation so naturally… if I didn’t expend so much energy over the Xmas weeks and lead up, I’m sure I’d be more active in January. Or maybe not..

I cannot leap into action right now. I cannot launch any thing new. I am underground. Buried by peaty soil. Growing roots. I feel like a bit like I’m decomposing. Parts of me are breaking off still. Flaking away.

I keep coming across fallen trees that are wet and rotting.. their bark coming apart like some slow cooked stringy meat.. that I don’t eat, may I add. I think that’s me. I’m rotting down into something else. Parts of me coming apart. Like I’m holding the entrails up in my hands, inspecting them and asking which of this do I even need. How easily it comes away in my hands or beneath my foot.

I guess we don’t have to carry every fibre of us into the future. Some of it must be left as food, nourishment for the next thing. No. This is not the time for newness.

I spend my mornings in nature. The other day I walked through woods where I always get lost. It’s a relatively small space and yet everytime I walk here I am lost. The path disintegrates… into a bog or just appears to not to be the solid way I thought it was. I end up climbing over fallen trees and shimmying under others. Nevertheless I find beauty.. clearings I haven’t discovered before. Trees I don’t know. Moss and lichen growing in places I haven’t touched lately.

Being lost often leads to finding newness. New land and new ground. In fact, how do we know something is new if we did not first feel the uncertainly of being utterly lost.

I stumbled around for a while, enjoying the disorientation, before I decided perhaps I was being led. Fairy led. So I stripped off and turned my jumper inside out. Then piled the layers back on again. Almost immediately I re found the path that led back out of the woods.

We are never really lost.

And so… this is how I spend my mornings. Walks beneath grey skies and between bare trees.

I have a new hatred for the mud too. How it slows me down.. how I must more carefully stare at my feet as I pick my path. How I end up looking down all the time. Must everything be a damn metaphor, because now I know that this is what I must do. I must check that my feet are rooted and strong and sure footed, before I raise my eyes to the tops of the trees. Before I rest them on the horizon line.

Each year I become more the person I am meant to be. I focus on integrity and authenticity. What must go so the new version of me has space to arrive.

It’s not a big thing. It’s quiet. There is no fan fare. No artistic uncovering. No whipping away of the shroud to reveal some bright sparkly magic new me. Naked and shimmering.

I’m more animal like.. a bent backed thing with hair I refuse to cut. A shawl of sticks and skeletons of leaves. It’s disgusting quite frankly. Hideous even. Hag like. Hunched and crooked.

I can’t do it any other way I’m afraid. I dont Want to. And so for now… I will be some rotten thing. Feeding the land with the parts of me I am done with. I trust the green shoots will return in time.

That something truer will grow here.

We are never really lost

We are never really lost.

Into the woods I go to lose my mind and find myself.