The gloaming

In winter our planet moves around to the best possible angle for evening sun. Through my kitchen window, night after December night, the gloaming envelops everything with it's vibrance. And as 2014 is coming to an end, it's now time to hibernate, look back and look forward.

Every year around this time I choose a word to guide me through the following year. Last year it was Pilgrimage which allowed me to sail into my sixties with imagination. This year I am being drawn in another direction.

Here's how it works.

Around this time of the year I start to doodle in a journal. Spider mind maps, lists, words. I started one thread recently by thinking about the lake, then lake goddesses, then deep water, deep-end, out of my depth, deeper, and so on...... it's about exploring rather than planning, it's playing.

Later in the New Year of 2015  I will settle on a word which becomes like a loose web into which my life and work fall. Something like that anyway! In 2012 I chose EXPAND, in 2013 I chose LIGHT.

So maybe you would like to have a go this year? Susannah Conway has a Workbook which might help. Or you could design your own method? Just choose a word that will light you up and allow your mind to run amuck with delight! For some reason the vagueness and focus of choosing ONE word, works a kind of alchemy.... if you let it.

Have you ever experimented with choosing a word for your year? If so I'd love to hear about it. If not then I hope you will enjoy the hibernation of advent and these December skies

The absent fisherman......

The ice has gone for now and the lake is deserted and quiet. During December last year I walked around its perimeter pacing out the last days of his illness. There was nothing surer than the beginning of the end, and no one could alter it.

Today a daybreak sunbeam spotlights a forgotten pair of oars.  And there he is, the absent fisherman.

His hands resting on his lap. The blanket which warmed his shivery limbs. Reciting the names of his children and grandchildren, touched by his internal picture of each one as they came to mind.

The living, breathing lakeside is a million miles away from that room.  How much he would love to have seen just one more shimmering winter dawn like this!

In winter

Winter has set in here in Foxglove Lane. How beautiful, how sad. A time to reflect, pause and hibernate. Out there, the pace is slowing down. Inside, the candles are lit and the wood is in. All is quiet. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that there is anything left to snap out there in a bleak grey December. I give up, I retreat. Then one day I wake up, to life, to the light, and to a new sparkly winter's day.

This chilly, dreamy slideshow was inspired by the haunting music of artist Kate Glavey. I don't know a lot about how her new album came to be. I just know that Kate is a committed and creative individual who is constantly developing her work. I found her beautiful album to be surprisingly raw and emotionally charged. It immediately hooked me.

In winter, by Burrows can be accessed on www.burrowsinwinter.bandcamp.com. Take a dander over there to sample more, I came away with a couple of special Christmas gifts.