I wanted to send out to you a final email of the year, to acknowledge this season of intense dark (often, it seems, metaphorically as well as literally), to say welcome to those of you who are new at this virtual fireside, and to say how much I’m looking forward to some of the ideas we’ll be exploring together next year.

At a time of year which encompasses so many different religious celebrations, my practice for a good three decades or so has been principally to anchor myself in the Winter Solstice: the moment that T.S. Eliot so beautifully called ‘the still point of the turning world’. Whatever other dates we humans might choose to focus our seasonal festivities and beliefs around, Solstice is an actual, physical moment to ground us in the realities of the physical world we occupy, as creatures who – whatever else we might conceive of ourselves as being – are undeniably physically incarnated beings. The longest night; the shortest day. For me, in all my many decades of religious and spiritual swayings and switherings, it’s been the one time I can hold tight to – even in the years when I’ve also chosen to celebrate Christmas. When I go outside (which I always try to do) at that moment when the sun stands still and look up into the sky, I feel myself more in tune with the world than ever – in tune with a cosmos that carries on along its own journey of becoming, doing whatever it is designed to do, regardless of all our human failures and frailties. In which the cycles at least are inexorable, even when the seasons shift as a consequence of climate change.

It would be easy to argue that the holiday season is easy for me, compared to the complicated waters that some of my friends find themselves navigating: I have no children, no close family, and my dearest friends live at a distance. So I don’t have to fit in with anyone else’s routines and ways of being any more; I get to choose my own. That can be lonely sometimes, though: David doesn’t do celebrating, beyond the cursory raising of a glass. Which rather reduces the options, but hey, that’s marriage. In some ways, though, this lack of structure and focus makes it harder, because the path of least resistance would be to treat the Christmas season just like any other, except maybe with an extra Sunday or two in squeezed into a two-week period.

In previous years, alongside whatever feasts are being cooked and candles lit in the house, I’ve followed a variety of more inward-focused practices to honour what are commonly, at least here in the UK, referred to as ‘the Twelve Days of Christmas’. The Twelve Days normally begin to be counted after Christmas Day i.e. on December 26, though some traditions have Christmas Day as the first; by that reckoning, the last of them is Epiphany (January 6). They were assigned by the Council of Tours in the year 567, initially for a very practical reason to do with coordinating the Roman solar Julian calendar with the lunar calendars of its provinces in the east. Whatever its original derivation, it has always seemed to me to be a time out of time, one of those ‘times between stories’ that I so love to write about.* And so I take myself offline for the purposes of work-related communication and its accruing demands during that period – actually, from Winter Solstice, if at all feasible – and spend it in a much more contemplative fashion, making sure that at a minimum, I spend some time every day gently turning my attention to acknowledging the year that’s passed and wondering about the new cycle that’s just being born.

The time that I spend dreaming into the year ahead isn’t ever to make anything remotely resembling a plan; that seems to me to go against the spirit of the season. It’s a time, as I’ve written so often before, to hold ourselves still, right there in the heart of the dark, in the heart of this sacred pause, in this place between stories. It’s a time to immerse ourselves in the cycles of nature and of any embodied soul that’s a part of it: of death and rebirth, of deep darkness and the slow return of the light. It’s a time to submit to change and transformation, letting the long, cold dark strip us down to the bare bones. Letting winter strip us bare like an old oak tree. Letting the final leaves that we’re clinging onto fall. Letting it all fall, and seeing what still holds us upright.

So I most definitely don’t follow a psychological checklist or any kind of mental ‘to-do’ list at this time of year, although Substack is replete with people telling us what we should be thinking and journalling about. Write about this, analyse that, evaluate this situation and this relationship, do this ritual – because you still have to be busy, still have to achieve, can’t stop striving, can’t ever just be quiet for a while and see what arises ... For me, this isn’t a time to neatly organise my thoughts and reflections, it’s a time to surrender to the deeper psyche. To try to discern the yearnings that are arising inside me. To open up a space for the glimmerings of a new way forward. New archetypes, perhaps, arising. To let insights arise too, in their own way, in their own time, out of the silence – insights into the trajectory of my own becoming.

It's probably a good couple of decades since I celebrated Christmas itself, and I haven’t done it wholeheartedly since I was sixteen, and emerging from one of those long period of intensely emotional religiosity that come upon many of us in our teens. For a very long time afterwards, I was angry with Christianity. Now I begin to see that I was actually angry at its institutions, run by men for the glory of men and the God who they created in their image. Now that I’m older, and softer as well as fiercer (I’m also beginning to love the delicious contradictions of ageing), I find myself warming to some of the messages and ideas that it promulgated at its best – though I don’t call myself a Christian and could never submit to those profoundly patriarchal institutions. But, not surprisingly, I was slowly led to this warmer understanding and relationship by a woman: the supremely marvellous Hildegard of Bingen. Her insistence on honouring the forgotten and suppressed divine feminine in the biblical traditions, as well as the immanence of the divine in the world with her concept of viriditas, captured my heart a long time ago. Well, I’m sure these are some of the things we’ll explore in the months ahead, for those of you who will be joining in with my exploration of women’s spirituality in the ‘Temenos’ section of The Hearth next year.

What I’m really trying to make my way around to here is to offer you a poem for the season that, in something of departure for me, has a Christian flavour. It’s one that, when I came across it somewhere a couple of weeks ago, tugged both at my heart and my imagination, speaking to a genuinely more grounded, wilder, older, more beautiful tradition that I discovered in what we might loosely call ‘Celtic Christianity’ while studying some of the old female saints during my MA in Celtic Studies a few years ago. I’m especially surprised to be offering you a poem by a former Archbishop of Canterbury, because that role is one of the pillars of those problematic institutions, and it doesn’t exactly fill me with trust and joy – especially after the couple of decidedly unedifying weeks that the Anglican church has just inflicted on us here in the UK. I believe wholeheartedly that any institution run only by men and predominantly for the benefit of men will always shelter abusers – though let’s face it, the nuns didn’t do any better in Catholic Ireland. It’s the institutions and their dogma that are the problems, in the end.

Anyway, my point is that although he too seemed to find the job difficult after a few years in the role of Archbishop of Canterbury, and returned to his more academic leanings, Rowan Williams is an interesting man who had a lot going for him – not least the fact that he is a very fine poet indeed. So, in the spirit of the Christmas-ness of the season, here is ‘Advent Calendar’, by Rowan Williams. Think of it, if it will help you to appreciate it, as a myth. And remember that all the best myths, at their heart, are true.

He will come like last leaf’s fall.One night when the November windhas flayed the trees to the bone, and earthwakes choking on the mould,the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.One morning when the shrinking earthopens on mist, to find itselfarrested in the netof alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.One evening when the bursting redDecember sun draws up the sheetand penny-masks its eye to yieldthe star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,will come like crying in the night,like blood, like breaking,as the earth writhes to toss him free.He will come like child.

And with that – a reminder that our first live Zoom session of 2025 will be on Saturday 1 February, from 16.00–17.30 UK time. (As always, you’ll find dates on the Calendar page.) We’ll be thinking about the return of the light and the coming of spring. And in the meantime, there’ll be more from me in the Temenos section.

Pendragon Castle in winter