Singing as the Darkness Lifts 01/01/2024
It was difficult to place the smell as the day started this morning. The closest I could get was the smell of the inside of a new fridge door.
Sleep time last night was framed by the moon. First of all in a sky punctuated by fireworks as we took a midnight walk, and this morning on the other side of the house when I got up to make the first cups of tea of the new year.
It was good to walk at midnight and to make the discovery that we see more fireworks by going in the opposite direction to the one we have often taken on previous years. The weather has been rainy and windy over the past few days so it felt good that our little stroll to welcome in 2024 pretty much remained dry.
I missed writing my blog last week. I decided not to write as it was Christmas Day and I felt it would not really fit in, but it felt strange having started a new habit of making this blog and podcast. Interestingly, I also forgot to take note of what the air smelt like in the early morning of a Monday for the first time in 17 weeks.
A lot happened last year. One of the things I was remembering yesterday was the feeling of sadness and disappointment when for me 2023 began with a very painful bottom! (Thanks to the friends I rang for advice – you made a real difference and your listening ears are the best!)
It is important to me to look back before looking forward and when I look back on 2023 I see two particular moments frozen in time... the real sorrow of the death of a wonderful work colleague and the earlier in the year ‘seize the moment’ decision I made to take a change of career.
This brings me to the photo for this week’s blog. Alt text describes the photo as: ‘a can ring pull on the ground’. I say it is ‘Ludwig’ by Jo and that it is one of my favourite #ElasticBandPhotos. I can clearly remember the morning Jo came into work and told me there was an elastic band down the road if I wanted to go and photograph it. I love the background debris and the way the discarded elastic band makes an egg shape that captures a ring pull inside it. And I really love the fact that Jo understood that I would want to take this photo. (In case you are wondering why ‘Ludwig’... that name comes from a cartoon character from when I was young.)
Still thinking about new years... For me there have always seemed to be two new years in each calendar year. Working in education gave me the September new year of newly polished shoes and the January new year of ‘oh, should I be making resolutions now?’ Mix this in with my having to learn not to let the darkness of Winter affect me too early in Autumn and it gave me quite a strange relationship with September to January for a while. I enjoyed learning to see Winter as a path towards my favourite season of Spring and it was a revelation to me how many beautiful sunrises were in February. I feel grateful for the fact that my early morning commutes showed me this.
Here’s to singing as the darkness lifts. Here’s to the love of the birds that welcome the dawn, the feeling of any kind of darkness lifting, the moments of joy that make hearts sing.
I will leave you today with a poem that was recently published in the Black Bough Christmas-Winter anthology. This poem originated from my driving to work tweets...
DRIVING TO WORK JANUARY 2022
A lazy yellow moon hammocks in a blue sky.
A white cat bounds across the road
intent on its own adventure
before sunrise makes stained glass
of the gaps in the cloud.
A chorus of birds sounds at my journey’s end.
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