From the belly of the earth

I recognise the feeling now, my fourth cycling through this mark in the year, the third time while paying attention. A restlessness, an urge to sort things out, to move around and touch and handle my things, in contrast to the heavy pull to stillness of December, always fought against by the inevitable busyness that the run up to Christmas brings. The end of January feels different, and I start to want to to put my house in order in preparation for… what? The coming burst of growth that is spring, I now think. I had noticed the urge before I read up and learned that a spring clean was one of the ways to prepare for Imbolc. I wondered if I had always felt it, but not known what it was about. If a meaningless stirring had just added to the previous uncomfortable experience of January as a miserable sort of month. This year, distracted by other things, the urge preceded my realisation of where we were in the year once again. The familiar feeling grounded me. Ah, it must soon be Imbolc.

I felt something in me close when I opened the boxes and Tupperware containing torn and scattered seed packets. When I gathered them up, separated them into piles for my garden, and for the school; for beauty and for food.

I felt it close as I opened the pages of books bought and then discarded on shelves, grown dusty over months. I devoured the words of others entire in single sittings; my brain washed clean of my own thoughts.

It closed when I went out into the garden first thing in the morning, coat thrown on over pyjamas, boots on bare feet, coffee steaming in the cold. I looked at the beds covered in winter detritus and started to feel the pull to intervention, while the children ate breakfast in the conservatory and looked out at me. ‘Mummy’s gone to the garden again.’

Our Imbolc garden. Death at first glance. Swathes of brown, gradually bleaching to buffs and creams, or disintegrating into the dark mulch of the earth below, punctuated by a few evergreens. Fewer this year than previous. Things which have stood part evergreen in years past now brown and crisp after the hard, prolonged frosts of this winter. I dream into the gaps.

But when I pause and look more closely, there is life, so much of it. Rosettes of green huddle close to the earth everywhere beneath brown blankets. Pointed clumps of bulbs show themselves throughout, including places I don’t remember planting them. The winter flowering beauties begin to shine. Snowdrops, which had not flowered in a too shady patch at the bottom of the garden – dug up, divided and moved last winter – begin to show dozens of white and green faces in their new home. The hellebores stand through the harshest cold, prettily freckled petals bowed. Witch hazel in spidery orange bloom; the softest pink puffs adorning the long arms of a willow to be reined in; viburnum still going; Daphne just beginning to show herself. Dangling bells of winter clematis turn the unprepossessing shed briefly beautiful. And hidden beneath all of them, the lemon yellow of primroses.

I’ve gone to the garden again, laptop closed, draft submitted, edited, and edited again. I wondered how I would know it was done, would know when to stop chasing some unattainable perfection, when to make peace with the fact that I had probably said what I could say well enough.

It was decided for me. Like the turning of the year, like the restless urge to tidy and sort; to put indoor concerns away in preparation for time outside, my internal season changed. The book was closed and here was the rest of life opening again.

Imbolc, the season of one door closing while the window of spring begins to open. The stoking of the fire of fecundity in the earth’s belly. The season when the waters of new growth begin to flow.

The book will be birthed into the world at the start of August – Lughnasadh. When I know that I will feel the garden’s growth tumbling into overwhelm, threatening to consume me whole among its tangled stems, thick with flowers. Just like I know that the following Imbolc will bring that feeling of rising sap. We have moved through a door of the year. It is shut behind us. Time for a new season to open.