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The Door the Earth Opens
The elder looked altered. Clear ice held to every branch, not as ornament or weight, but as precision. The tree did not carry ice upon it. It looked as though it had been cast in glass – not iced over, not hung with icicles, but rendered entirely transparent, its form taken and held. Branch after branch stood revealed, exact and uninterrupted, the whole shape suddenly legible. The apple beside it shared the same condition, as though both had slipped, briefly and without resis
On Solace, Stillness, and the Discipline of Less
Deep winter asks very little, yet it offers something increasingly rare – permission to stop shaping oneself. When the year has withdrawn from growth and display, when light is scarce and sound softens, a quality of quiet emerges that is not empty but sufficient. It does not console or reassure. It simply holds. This is not the stillness of waiting for what comes next. It is the stillness that arrives when striving has loosened its grip. The nervous system settles. The mind g
When Darkness Is No Longer Permitted to Do Its Work
On the Beara Peninsula, the winter solstice still arrives as a working cosmology rather than a seasonal motif. Under a north-facing sky where the old bearings remain legible, the longest night exposes a deeper crisis – not of technology, but of orientation, rest, and cultural memory. On the winter solstice, standing on the Beara Peninsula and facing north, the rupture shaping modern life reveals itself as cosmological rather than technological. This is the longest night of th
The Work of Winter: Touch and the Remembering of the Body
Touch. The first sense. The first language. Before sound, before sight, before any word was formed, there was the meeting of skin with world, a quiet dialogue between body and existence. Through touch we learned that we are here, that there is ground beneath us, that life can be met and known. It is the oldest way of saying yes. Many speak of five senses, yet if we listen more closely, there are many, many more, each opening a doorway between head, heart, and hands. At the fo
Where the Womb Enters Winter
Menopause is most often framed as loss – of fertility, rhythm, relevance, ease. It is medicalised, managed, and softened, yet rarely understood in terms of season. What is absent from much of modern societal language is a more fundamental recognition: the womb, like the land, has a winter. Nothing that lives is organised for perpetual outward motion. Growth withdraws. Energy consolidates. Life turns inward in order to endure. In indigenous cultures shaped by land and season,
Elemental BEing and the Language of Nature
A reflection on returning to the elemental language of being, where the states we move through are not problems to fix but seasons to honour. If we began to describe ourselves through the language of nature, we might find a gentler way of understanding who we are. So much of the modern world teaches us to define ourselves by what is wrong, to diagnose, to categorise, to measure. But the earth doesn’t work like that. It changes by relationship, not by rule. The oak doesn’t apo
Reclaiming Enchantment After Exhaustion
There are times when the marrow of life feels spent. We arrive at the edge of our own strength and find only hollowness echoing back....