The ten days between the Winter Solstice begins and ends with the revelry of Christmas and the New Year, but the days in-between are the Janus days, looking both backward and forward. The slippery slope where dreams of ambitious plans compete with the memory of past abandoned, or derailed, plans. Approaching 70 in the New Year, I am most familiar with derailed plans after the past two years of unwelcome moments, the untuned instruments and the static on the radio, the we are not prepared to hear. The heavy weather of fortune has turned and abated for us at the moment, but storms, personal, national and international, are always on the horizon in these tricky times. We always enter into the unknown.
The grey skies and the occasional "oblique light" of the northern latitudes is very depressing as winter moves into the early months of the year. I am writing at 3 o'clock in the afternoon in a dark room. The light is beginning to come back, but that is hard to remember. By the end of this week, we will have added one minute of light in the morning and six minutes in the afternoon. If you are a photosensitive sleeper like I am, and have no need to rise early for work or family, the darkness until after 8 am is a seasonal luxury. The miraculous side of winter is how life goes on for plants and animals who have adapted in ways to be ready for the arrival of spring. The bulbs and plants and shrubs and trees have set their flower and leaf buds, ready for the proper hours of sun to return. Very soon the British daffodil season will be on us as a precursor to real spring when the crops are harvested on the Channel Islands still warmed, for now, by the North Atlantic Drift of the Gulf Stream. Last evening, I heard "the heart-chilling scream of the courted vixen" as we ate supper. Hampstead has an abundance of foxes, and unlike the first year we lived here, I am used to their noisy mating season, and familiar with their charming kits in the spring.
I read Julian Beach's poem Lux Brumalis two days ago in Winter, part of a four volume seasonal anthology of prose and poetry edited by Melissa Harrison for England's Wildlife Trust. I began with Spring late last winter and tried to read a selection every morning through Summer and Autumn as the year unfolded. In two months, I will start all over again, as commanded by the closing lines of Lux. I am embarrassed to admit this: I am not a poetry person, in fact I have sometimes wondered what is the point of poetry when a full sentence with subject and verb would communicate ideas much more clearly. When I read Lux, I knew this was special; when I went back and reread it several times, I discovered that I finally understood the point of poetry. Perhaps this is a one-off, and I will only ever truly appreciate Julian Beach. His website https://julianbeachwriting.wordpress.com is packed with many beautiful poems.
Melissa Harrison's anthologies are available here in the UK everywhere, and in the US according to Amazon.com, but they are very much geared to English nature and landscapes. The beautiful covers are enough to justify having them on the coffee table.
