In the cold, crisp air of Winter, the earth and everything is nourished by it is quiet and dark. Whilst the odd magpie struts across the grass and small wrens wiggle tails on fenceposts, and the rabbits nonchalantly twitch across the grassy paddock, digging their patches and avoiding foxes, most of nature is entering a time of vegetative dormancy. The mornings are exhalations of the night's sighs - darkly foggy, a veil that disguises a sleepy day that refuses to shine until at least after ten, and then only allows warmth behind panes of glass or on north facing front decks.
All over the vegetable patch the winter weeds are pushing up through the soil, and more wanted self seedings, like the pretty fronds of fennel and the curled edges of kale. I tenderly remove the shoots and replant them where I want them, leave others to do what they will. Here the winters might be cold, but the brassicas thrive, and lettuce, rainbow chard and other greens provide nourishment. The only blossoms now are the natives - banksia and grevillea catch the afternoon sun, reflecting back the gold light that blesses the southern hemisphere and makes the winter more bearable.
I miss the days where I would hibernate too. Humans don't seem to follow the patterns of nature - we have moved away from the times where we would get up with the sun and go down with the day, make hay whilst the sun shone and hunkered down when it didn't. The earth uses winter to rest - humans keep at their frantic pace, doggedly refusing to let the leaves of their labour fall away a little so that they can provide fertility for the next season. Human time seems to have only a long, drawn out summer and moments of exhausting winter, guilty under the covers when one 'should' be working.
We need to be a little more seasonal with our lives - across the longer expense of a year, or in the flow of a day. Dawn is for one thing, dusk is for another. The sun cannot shine all the time - it's exhausting.
And so I remind myself that winter is a time for restoration, for nourishment, for reflection. To do anything but goes against nature itself. It's about the h-earth, the heart-h - the hearth or fire, the home energy, for me, the lam, lam, lam, lam of the root chakra, the root in the dark earth that needs this time to gather what it needs so it can step firmly and surely out in the world again when it's needed. It's about warming soup on the fire, and herbal teas that warm: chai with ginger, cloves, turmeric and cayenne, or the beautiful red berries collected in late Autumn - hawthorn and rosehip because they're healing and protective. Wrapping my hands around a mug of tea and staring at the fire without doing is winter energy to me, allowing myself to be rooted to the quiet earth, and one with the darkness. It's a time of root vegetable soups, sprinkled with the earthiness of harissa or dukkah, or roast vegetables with garlic and rosemary.
How I wish that all our rituals obeyed the need for regenerative, restorative time, rather than blooming in the light and on show all the time. Our bodies need rest, and time to restore. It's impossible to be on all the time. It makes me anxious and on edge, out of alignment if I obey the human laws of productivity - the new laws that forget what we are meant to be - no more than rabbits, or wrens, or magpies, or the seeds in the soil.
And so, on this cold and dark afternoon, I sit for a time, breath, and watch the sun go down in the quiet sky, hands wrapped around a mug of chai and doing nothing at all, and exactly what I'm meant to do.
