After The Solstice

22nd December 2011 Thursday

We spent last night - The Winter Solstice - when the light disappears for the longest time - among dear friends in a beautiful Christmassy candle-lit home. In the garden courtyard we stood round a wide rimmed fire bowl, crackling with logs and rosemary branches and threw pieces of paper into the flames - letting the old year’s pain and sadness go up in smoke. We drank mulled wine and hot spiced apple juice and feasted from a table laden with the all the deep-earth food of mid-winter - carrot cumin soup, chestnuts and red cabbage, garlicky potatoes and butternut squash, sticky parkin squares and chocolate gingerbread.

This morning I sat in a traffic jam in the middle of Exeter, late for my appointment, and despaired of ever getting to the end of my Christmas list. I lay on a couch and felt the magic fingers of a wonderful man kneading away the knots in my lower back - deep in my right side where I carry my father and my husband.......

This afternoon I made a cinnamon custard for ice-cream and rolled out pastry for mince pies. I cobbled together the trimmings into an apple turnover - and remembered my mother who always made jam crescents with her leftover pastry......

And all day I have been so grateful for all the love and abundance in my life which holds me up, sustains me like cupped hands offering me water.