Eight pm on the 18th of December sees my third attempt at writing something about a Simple Winter Solstice. The previous versions got mired in the history, more accurately the my-story, of how I got to where I am. I wrote reams about what I used to do, about what I now don’t like about the way other people do the festive season. I wrote at length about commercialism and the mis-sold fantasies. I wrote a lot of other more complicated stuff.
And then I remembered. This is my portal into the new year. This is where I really begin with my intentional journey into – if not actual Simplicity – certainly into Simpler.
What a wonderful function is the delete key!
A lesson from my own journal: not a universal dictum, just a Note-to-Self: don’t try to write the thing before you’ve lived it.
So…here is the living of it.
18th December
A wet and windy day as I travelled down to the Essex coast. The trains were empty and ran on time. I met Poppy, a guide-dog-in-training, who was looking at everything with that concentrated frown that you see in very young children when they don’t understand. She was the most good-natured thing. I hope she passes. Not all of them do. As the woman said, "It is now a very different world that we have to train them to manage, especially if they are going to be city dogs. They need to be much more resilient, much more confident." Not just us then.
~
I’m here, precisely here at this table with a view out into the darkness, because I have been here before. When I came in February in order to walk the Naze, I came into this room and decided there and then that this was where I wanted to be for the Winter Solstice. From the latest weather forecast, I suspect I will get a view of grey-on-slate-on- gunmetal come the day…but you never know…and I believe that some instincts must be acted upon. So, this visit has been on the books for most of the year, with no plan other than I wanted to be here.
The wind is dropping. The street lamp below my window is no longer swaying dangerously. The tide is ebbing. White water has its own light. There is no moon. There are no stars. The building is falling quiet after a few hours of creaking like an old wooden schooner.
There is a green light at the end of the pier. Gatsby comes to mind again. I think about the whole festive season marketing campaign of beautiful people in beautiful clothes. I remember wanting that kind of glamour. I didn’t get it. Probably just as well. I’m now sitting in a half-lit room, in pyjamas that I bought for the cold nights of Nepal nearly twelve years ago. I’m barefoot, because I have the heating on.
I’ve settled in. I don’t have a plan.
19th December
Morning. The sea is calm after yesterday’s storm. I had forgotten the downside of this beautiful flat: just how uncomfortable is the bed. I did not sleep well, but still, I am up and about, with coffee and a view and a pen in my hand.
The gulls are doing their morning routine of ‘circuits and bumps’ – swooping low over the sea and then catching the thermal in the lea of the buildings. A single jet draws a straight white line above the thinning cloud. There’s a dark bank on the horizon. A ship, indeterminate, is a solid grey block. Spectral wind turbines are slowly emerging into the visible spectrum. The water is somewhere between burnished steel and molten mercury. It scarcely ripples where it meets the sand. A tired, sleepy sea, looking like it’s all just too much effort.
In the street between my building and the beach, morning life passes by. A stooped man in shorts and a heavy Parka. Occasional cars and vans. A small flock of pigeons. Speed-walkers in trainers and light jackets: female, long-haired and lithe. Or maybe they’re just in a hurry, on their way to work. A little girl in a padded pink jacket, with a matching backpack, holds her father’s hand. It’s not the weekend yet and the grey skirt and tights speak of a school uniform. She seems by her gait happy enough to be going. Why do I assume it’s her father? Could just as easily be a brother, an uncle, a neighbour. Friendly enough anyway. At her age I was no longer holding my father’s hand in the street. Nor was I being walked to school.
I am feeling like the slow sea. Just watching. Not waiting for anything to happen. I have a recollection of writing something similar at the beginning of the year: how one could sit at this window all day, simply noticing.
An older boy walks with a woman. At least, she walks. He trudges. Sulky.
A prom walker wears a hoodie beneath her jacket. Her bobble hat bobs in tune to her purposeful stride. A red bus passes, empty. The advance guard of starlings checks out the roof next door.
The walker returns. I guess the pier is her turn-around point and wonder if she does this every day. A small boy, weighed down by a backpack almost as big as he is, marches in step with his mother. He clutches a small plastic toy. She vapes. Early-middle-aged men pause to cross the road, chatting amiably, smiling. Hands in pockets as they wait, emerge to continue the animation of their
explanations.
There are more cars now, but not what you could call a steady stream. Intermittent spurts. Not exactly rush hour.
The quicksilver creeps slowly over bronze sand towards the wall, drowning the breakwaters whose tops begin to look like seals peeking up between the swells.
Another bus. Also empty.
A patch of white light suggests that the sun is approaching the upper limit of the horizon cloud bank. What constitutes a sunrise might be open to interpretation. There is the faintest suggestion of a light-path upon the sea.
A quad bike sputters past pulling a trailer and trailing streams of bunting and tinsel.
A strip of cloud crosses out the sun as it if were a mistake. Another silent jet edges to the south & west, while at lower altitude a smaller plane leaves no trail. The sea reaches the bottom of the wall.
The first dog-walkers begin their patrol. Terriers on long leads frustrated by the boredom of pavement, pull towards steps they cannot descent today, drink from puddles. Sun and cloud continue their duel. The moon-governed sea pays no attention. A woman without a child or dog and with nowhere urgent to be stands by the wall and watches the water. Strolls. Stops. Watches. Moves on.
The sun clears that main cloud bank but remains mid-Winter-snow in colour. This is a white sun, not the golden one of Summers and children’s pictures. A cold sun. But the path it drips across the quiet sea all the way to the wall below my feet calls me outside.
~
I walk the beach. Pick up sea glass and shells. Take a hundred photographs, of which only half a dozen are worth keeping. I am entranced by the under-pier cavern, the cathedric nature of columns like trunks, green like the forest.
~
As night falls – early in the afternoon – I realise how far removed I am from the razzle of modern festivity. The lights I see are the year-round ones. White lights mark the inner edge of the pier. Green ones its distant outpost. Before the cloud settles backdown there are distant white indicators of passing ships and red flashing sequences on the turbine farm. Perhaps the latter are navigational as well as warnings. Does each installation have its own interval and flash, like lighthouses? I think about Dad sailing down past this coast seventy-five years ago. He could never have imagined he’d a have a daughter, and that she would sit here, writing, looking out to where he once rode, looking in. Even twenty-fiveyears ago, he would not have imagined me here, doing this…because neither would I.
~
Later, I turn off the indoor lights, to look out to sea. Open the window to listen to the water. I catch a bright star and know to wait to accustom my gaze skywards. Having seen one star, my brain knows what to look for and sees the next and the next…and there he is, directly ahead: Orion watching over me as he always has. Betelgeuse shines particularly red tonight. And the sea is again almost at its height, quietly so.
~
20th December
The precise moment of the Solstice this year is tomorrow (21st) at 15.03hrs. It is a precise moment, astronomically speaking. If we revert it to the 12-hour clock it becomes 3.03, which seems somehow a little more momentous. As if its GMT time were somehow more significant than whatever other hour in all the other time zones.
Taking the more Celtic view of things, I choose to honour the festival from sundown to sundown. Technically, for those who care about the precision, I believe that when the momentary solstice is after mid-day, the longest night will be the one following, not the one preceding. That results in the choice between commencing the commemoration on the not-quite-longest night and through the day of the sol-sistere to the setting of the sun that day, or not beginning the celebration until the moment itself has passed. The former makes more sense to me.
I am on the beach as the sun disappears behind clouds and headlands. Low tide. Gulls are gathering at the shoreline as the light lowers…within half an hour they will have dispersed to wherever they roost for the night. It is almost as if they are attending an evening service, acknowledging the sea and their food source and praying for good hunting tomorrow. More likely they are just absorbing the last of the light and warmth of the day.
I pick up a piece of sea glass. I pick up fragments of oyster shells. I have spent part of the day learning how important our native oysters are to the health of our waters. I pick up a shell with a small circular hole in it. Something else I learned today: if you find a shell with a perfectly circular hole in it, it may be that it has been attacked by a dog whelk. The dog whelk is a carnivorous sea snail, which uses a radula (toothed tongue) to drill a hole through the shell of their prey. They inject liquid through the hole, which dissolves the animal inside so that they can then slurp it up. I did not know that!
From my pocket I take a handful of drilled stones, crystals, pieces of meal. Tiger’s Eye. Quartz. Carnelian. Haematite. They had formed beads on a bracelet. For courage, clarity, creativity. For letting go of negativity. When the bracelet broke, I considered whether I could restring them, or wire them into something hang on my tree, but then I figured that the timing of the break might be significant. As I walked slowly along the edge of the beach, paddling even, if it can be called that when you’re wearing boots and not getting your feet wet, I threw each small stone, crystal, piece of metal into the sea. With each one, I sent a prayer: for the each of the people I know who are suffering and struggling, for less violence in the world, for more tolerance, more hope, for some of my own personal hopes for the year to come. Stones and crystal and fragments of ore will be worn to sand…and the prayers will be forgotten. The world turns.
~
There should be a mid-Winter feast should there not? The tradition goes back to the days when Winter would be a time of shortage and the one indulgence was to be a bodily stocking-up and a psychological one, a memory of good times that will come again when the harshness of winter is over. I suspect it was also a using up of the things of the harvest that could not be well preserved, despite the cold months ahead.
Feasting is relative: I toasted the ending of the year with cheap sparkling wine. I stir-fried half a steak, a few mushrooms and spring onions. Ate it with shop-bought creamy pepper sauce and mixed vegetables from the freezer. I will have the second portion of it all tomorrow.
~
Towards midnight, I open the window and stand in the wind. The sea is all white-water fury, lashing the wall and leaping. The tide is at the full, and the wind is behind it. The year is not leaving quietly. I breathe deeply – both in and out – accepting this as my world – and letting go of it at the same time. There is a strange pleasure to be had, standing at an open window in the dark, where the brightest thing in sight is the sea spume, the cresting waves, where the loudest thing is the water. Perhaps pleasure isn’t quite the right word. What is the word for those moments where you “know” but aren’t sure what it is that you “know” – either for the first time or again? The wildness and preciousness of life – the deepness of it – the absurdity of it. What else is standing at an open window on a midwinter night with the sea raging, if it is not absurd? And wild, and precious.
I stand for a long while, pulling on sweatshirt and socks and gilet and hat and gloves, watching the wild water. My peripheral vision notes the white lights at the inward end of the pier and the green outward end and the flashing reds of the turbines. My close vision notes the street lamp and the fog of spume beneath it. The sky is a blanket of nothing. Grey fading to darkness.
But most of my attention is on the bright white of breaking waves. Deep turbulent water where I was walking a few hours earlier. Water trying to move further inland than the concrete will allow. Nature insistent.
I watch. Mesmerised.
I am not thinking. I am only watching.
Until, there comes a moment where it seems the sea catches a breath. A moment of silent slack water. Then the waves come again. But there is another inhale, another pause, and the waves that come after are lower, less insistent. I believe that I have just watched the very moment of a tide turning. I do not think I have done that before.
The turning of the tide, the turning of the year.
~
21st December
If today is when we start to move back towards the light, there is no sign of it. There is no pre-dawn glow. The sea, the sky, both bleak in their greyness. Somewhere out there where one shade becomes an only slightly lighter shade, the sun must be rising. Indeed, by the hour on the clock and the data on the internet it has already risen, while I have been watching, unseeing.
Stillness. Quiet. The ripples of a tide just past the low. Time for reflection and new beginnings. The gulls are again gathered in the same spot at the water’s edge. Morning assembly. I wonder if any of the animals (of the land, the air, the water) sense the shift or if they will only know when the days become perceptibly lighter for longer or the temperature warms. Two things which do not happen in tandem. This may be mid-Winter by one calendar, but the coldest part of the year is not yet upon us.
Around the country this morning, people who identify as pagans or druids or other esoteric types will be gathering in sacred spaces and performing their rituals. My only ritual is to be up to welcome the dawn and bear witness to the turning of the year, unless you can count the prayers…and isn’t it strange that I do not?
I watch an unmoving sky and a slowly returning sea. I watch someone stroll along the beach, so wrapped up in coat and scarves and hat as to be gender-indeterminate from here.
There is an art to strolling. Beaches invite slow walking. Not everyone responds to the invitation – some have dogs to exercise, others want to get their steps in, complete their training runs.
The beach-wise however know that you are meant to walk slowly. You are meant to pause often. Peer at the pools left by the receding and waiting for the rising tide. Pick things up and sometimes put them in your pocket. You are meant to hear the watersong and the air. You are not looking for anything. You are not thinking about anything. You are not even creating a memory, because you will do this so often, here and elsewhere, this communing. You are walking because that is what your body is designed to do: this repeatedly-arrested fall, forward into the next moment and the next, just as the shallows creep forward and become the deeps, then retreat again.
You will come up off the beach, and quicken your steps back into your daily life, but for now you are outside of time.
The Solstice is a moment of sun-standing-still. Sol-sistere. A slow beach walk is as good a way as any of feeling into that stillness of time itself.
~/~
