January 2013

The guests have all now gone and there is nothing on the calendar for the rest of January. After two months of coping with the unexpected, loss and grief, and the whirl (tho’ subdued) of the holidays, it is time to catch our breaths. Our plans are to hibernate, to lay fallow for a while and try out some new routines and rhythms in the spaciousness we’ve been gifted with.

Not truly fallow, for my writings and offerings are now blooming again at Wisteria & Sunshine, and we won’t be spending all of our time at rest. Yes…today we are rearranging the living room to make a cosy viewing corner facing the fireplace and the telly for the three hours of Downton Abbey we intend to steep ourselves in this evening. But we will turn the seasonal lack of outside work for my deario and my lessened responsibilities into something nourishing…for our togetherness…for all that must be tended to within our home and gardens…and especially our creating our new day-to-days.

Whether Winter cooperates or not with us, we intend to burrow in with our blankets for generous amounts of sleep, fill our bowls with healthy and warming porridges, light more candles to fill the after-Christmas darkness, seek quiet and healing.

This daybook page is from October, but its words still hold true for me…as I feel I am finally, truly beginning the New Year, tho’ the calendar might tell me otherwise. I have my own inner calendar, and it tells me that these are the days full of promising emptiness, waiting to be thoughtfully filled…

 …where I expected to be on this eighth day of the New Year. I thought I would be well into the sweeping and redecorating and freshening of both the rooms of my beloved Wisteria & Sunshine and my own dear rooms of wood and plaster (dry wall, actually, but plaster sounds more romantic!) at home, stepping out into this new chapter of my life…

 …instead, the little illnesses continue. This second round of the ‘flu (probably a continuation of the first) finds me on the sofa at the beach house with all of my plans on hold, notebooks unopened and unwritten in, problem after problem cropping up at my website and with my computer…

 I am surrounded by blue…the water…the sky…the very stripes of the sofa I rest upon and towels I wrap my aching body in after the hot baths and showers I am grateful to have in abundance…all the while I long for the whites and browns and wintery greens of home and the leftover Christmas that awaits me there. Soon soon.

 I feel like the girl in my new Christmas book…on the threshold…arms and heart full of so many gifts…a little peaky and wrapped in something warm…looking out at all that awaits…but not quite ready…

Do I sound like I am complaining? I hope not, tho’ all of the technical troubles are definitely worth a grumble or two…no, I am actually fairly peaceful about the delays and changes in my plans. I don’t know that there are any profound lessons or deep messages to be discovered as I wait…but there has been a tiny layer or two of heart-healing as I have been stuck on Mom’s couch, in her home, surrounded by her photos…and I have made tiny movements towards making the rest of January more what I hoped the beginning of it would be…and I have recognized, in the stillness and through the stumbling blocks, that my feet are on the right path, that the life and work I am in the midst of I wish to continue on with…

So I will gently close the door against the cold again, and cosy up by the window a while longer, wrapped in my coverlets and shawls, notebooks and pencils at the ready, and watch and wait and do what I can.

And perhaps it will snow.