Tag: Slow Living

Seasons end and seasons change ✨🍃

I was having a conversation with a friend several days ago and she told me something which really got me thinking. Talking about a recent appointment with her acupuncturist, she said that her therapist had told her that it was always around the time of seasons changing, that her bookings increased noticeably.

I found this so interesting. As a farmers daughter I have grown up with an understanding of the seasons rhythms, and the ebb and flow of life around those phases. From Spring through to the following seasons, the turning of the year encompasses everything.

As I have spent more time learning and experiencing our role within that natural cycle, I have been increasingly drawn to the Celtic Wheel, as a way of living authentically in line with this way of being and observing the passing of time. Those festival days, and times of celebration or observation within the wheel, help to align my life and honour the seasonal flow within it.

As it suggests the Celtic Wheel encourages us to see the year as a circle; part of a continuous matrilineal O within which we constantly evolve, revolve and rebirth. And rather than a linear line that suggests a long run, a fixed destination or an end point we must always be striving and pushing for, the pattern of our lives reveals so much more about the part that ebb and flow has to play within it.

The feminine truth in all of this, for me, is the understanding that rest and renew have their place within the cycle of life in flow with both the fertile and the full. A wheel which as it turns, as it waxes and wanes, reflects more accurately the four seasons, the four phases of the moon.

When I think about the seasonality of our lives in this way, that the Celtic Wheel isn’t just something external to ourselves in the nature beyond. It is actually something that lies deep within us as humans, and can define and guide the human experience, if we let it.

When we remind ourselves that we are nature, that as a woman for example, I have my own menstrual cycle, which follows the phases of the moon. The moon herself waxes and wanes, effects tidal sea patterns and so much more, has her own part to play within my own cycle – a waxing and waning of hormones and energy. In this way it becomes clear that as we observe and honour the changing seasons around us, so must we observe and honour those changing seasons within ourselves too.

We are nature all of us. And therefore every part of who we are, whether that be physical or spiritual, is effected by the seasonal flow of ebb and flow, birth rebirth, and the waxing and waning of who are within the own Celtic Wheel of our own lifetimes.

It feels like a relief to me to think of a year, a day, a month, a life as being seasonal. Yes those wondrous full fertile times come in their fabulous blaze of colour and light. But those times do not alone define us, and it is the other times – the times when the wheel is on the descent that the belief in the ebb and flow really can help us. We need those descents and we need the fallow. We need the darkness of winter within ourselves when the matter of our souls lie dormant – just as winter retreats and returns to source.

That is the time for rest, for plans to be made and for the storing of energy for the coming of Spring within us, which will always arrive. Nature is never late and always comes when she is ready to do so. We should see ourselves in just that way too and grace ourselves with the knowledge that no matter how bleak those winter moments are… this too shall pass … and we will rise, just like the sleeping shoots or the resting ferns.

And that’s kind of where I am now. It’s been a busy time of pushing through with plans, bringing them to fruition and finally to blossom. It’s only when I look back I can see how much I have put into it and what I have done to make those plans abundant and come to pass.

And as with anything – I need the time to assimilate the changes I have encountered through the process of learning. Learning is only such if we allow ourselves to be changed and shaped because of them. Otherwise all we have is facts. So this break, this rest, gives me time to see myself in light of these changes and to embed those new parts of me into future plans that I am already beginning to dream. ✨🍃🍃

gathering together, staying in & letting go.

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Happy New Year and hello to January of 2018.

I have been quiet for some time on my blog now. I have struggled these past two months or so, with a really difficult feeling of not knowing what to write, feeling awkward writing anything, and just experiencing a disquieting eerieness about the whole situation. I never usually have trouble writing, even if its just lines in my diary. I find the process soothing, and for me, a way of making sense of my days. So to be stuck in the middle of an unwelcome and bewildering silence has made me lose my confidence a little.

To be honest, writing now, feels like that first clumsy and stiff morning on your first day back at school from a long summer holiday; when you find yourself holding a new pencil in your hand, and it feels as though you are holding a plank of wood between your fingers.

The ideas and thoughts for this post, therefore, have come from that sense of alienation and worry I experienced, feeling a little lost without the words to express what I was thinking about, and in truth, not having any clarity of thought anyway. A combination of Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Year and the enevitable quietness of January have all given me some time for reflection. And perhaps, afterall, that is what I have needed. Perhaps I just need to start from the beginning again.

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Coincidentally I have also spent most of this new year thinking and reflecting. I have been following a process called the January Book. Devised by the sylist and writer Hannah Bullivant (I found out about it via her amazing instagram account, and her beautiful website, which you can find at http://www.seedsandstitches.com), it is a way of outlining plans for your coming year by focusing on key areas of your life, dividing them into catergories such as family, career, finances and home, and by a process of reflecting on those areas, making a sustainable plan for the year ahead.

And in addition, we have been having a little more renovation to our home (from having a door made for the bathroom, where previously there was none) to having a partition wall put up between the living room and the sunroom (a rather grand term for what really is a little extension with a perspex roof) It has meant a lot of noise, a lot of mud and mess, and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed at having to tidy up ready for the next day, and not knowing where to begin.

But most of all I am really starting to notice a gathering change in my two little girls, as they are growing up from babies to little toddlers, and it is this realisation that has had the biggest emotional effect on me overall. I have loved every moment of them being babies – and the poignant reminder that if my IVF treatment hadn’t been succesful I would never have been able to experience any of it, has made it even more so.

And it is there I suspect all the answers to my wordless stories lie. Being quiet was neccesary for some thinking, and all my thinking was about change – and in reflecting on change, I began to see that it was all about letting go.

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Rituals, celebrations and every day.

 

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We will soon be moving into our new home. The three of us together. These last few months have been a funny time ~ packing up, throwing out, sorting, discovering, discarding and making. Moving home is such a strange and unsettling thing. I have moved house more times than I care to mention. Some have been so unremarkable in their happening that I hardly remember them at all. Others have involved long distances and new countries. Leaving one home tore my heart open and took me a very long time to get over, so much so that I still dream of it. A kind of childhood Manderlay, unchanged and welcoming.

Having experienced moving so many times, it seems from experience and reflection, that the reason it unsettles and bothers us, is because in the packing of our things, it is as if we are literally dissembling our carefully built world we have spent so long spinning and gathering around ourselves. Now it is time we transfer and transform our new worlds into our new homes, and we do so knowing that we cannot help but be changed in the process of it. It is that change which is both unsettling and exciting, New beginnings, but which one? And who will we become because of it?

This move is different in many ways. I am now a home owner, swapping the fluctuating, precariously fragile world of house renting for something more responsible, more stable but daunting nonetheless. Gone are the days of gathering friends, and sometimes strangers to share with, making little families out of people you don’t really know. I know, with a deep sigh, that I will be able to find that sense of rootedness, which I have wanted for so long. To know that I won’t need to be on the move, unless it is of our choosing.

So, with all that in mind, I have been thinking about what kind of family life we will have in the house. what kind of family we will be. How we will we mark our days, how we will carve out the celebrations, occasions and the everyday of our family home. I think it will be about building our identities and weaving our memories. it will be the story of becoming us.

 

 

 

 

 

A day like this

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What does an ordinary day look like? The sun rises, the sun sets and a there is a day’s worth of living in-between. And the living in-between is the thing. Sometimes, a day can feel like a lifetime, and others go by so quickly that you barely have chance to look around you, before it has all passed you by, and you are saying goodnight to the moon.

Since becoming a Mum, one of the many, unexpected, things that I have learnt is the way that a day will tumble into the next, and that there is never any time in-between to absorb and reflect on any of the amazing things that you see, feel and experience along the way. Your heart can swell with love one moment, then tears spring to your eyes the next. The smallest thing, like her first teeth showing in a cheeky smile, or a chubby hand clutching at a flower – and suddenly that deep unfathomable well of love, and pride and disbelief at the total amazing beauty if it all, comes rushing to the surface.

Yet, as my friend told me the other day, these deep feelings can arise out of a day that can be sometimes so unremarkable in its banality and ordinariness. Days where its all about the continuing cycle of breakfast and dish washing, clothes washing and drying, vacuuming, more tidying, more cooking, washing and ……

But it is within those routines and inevitabilities that the beauty comes through. in the knowledge that you are doing what you are doing for your family, that the sacred moments of heart stopping love sustain you like nothing else on earth, and that the routine, ordinariness, and rituals you create, are what gives your family shape and cohesion. The act of doing all that, however dreary, tiring and repetitive is ultimately that which creates security and safety.

You do what you do, for them, and you do what you do for them out of love.