Dark Surrounds Us

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part Ten)

It’s deep winter and the house is full of creaks and moans. Like an old woman creeping the stairs with a candle, darkness surrounding her pale face. It feels a long time till spring. I get most of my best thinking done around now. The emails have slowed their rata-tat-tat demands, and a very particular kind of headspace starts to open up. The deep dark surrounds us. It’s tempting to ho! ho! ho! your way through such an enveloping with pints and cocktails, but I think we should make the most of it. Lean into it, be a little less available.

As I write it’s snowing. The fire is lit in the library; I have a few puffs of a cigar and peer out of the window into the night. There’s fast moving flakes that whirl round the lamppost. I can see a Christmas tree still up in a neighbour’s window over the street, glinting gold and red. Surely I will spot Tumnus in just a moment, hurrying home.

My own house has changed personality. It’s closed in on itself. It’s moving towards something like what C.S. Lewis used to called Northerness. Not as vast and sky-strewn as Lewis’s description, rather hunched in like a hedgehog as the snow falls. I wake with a scratchy throat and my breath as a mist in the air, like my old days of living in the tent. I walk downstairs, feed the cats, get the kettle on, work on the fire for ten minutes. No visitors, not much daylight, a little salmon and biscuits to pick on. Mug after mug of strong tea.

It’s been an extraordinary year. I can’t always say that. Not without hard bits, but still. In middle-age I feel I’ve encountered something that has completely refreshed me. Like an animal I’ve never seen before. Like being confronted by a forgotten language and finding I can recognise some of the words.