Dear Readers,
Happy New Year and all that craic. I hope ye all survived OÃche Shamhna. I met two murder victims and a slutty cat this morning on my walk to the station and yesterday I slept through an alarm, wiped up mouse entrails from the kitchen floor, left home without my spectacles and ran for a train that was an hour and a half late. Plenty of tricks going on. Maybe I should have left the guts on the floor for the SÃ? Next time.
I’ve been thinking about next times, about cycles and the like. Here’s a visible version of something I drew on a beermat with my finger for my friend Marija the last time we met. Let’s say this is a year:
So far so good? And these are the two solstices – shortest day in December, shortest night in June:
These are the equinoxes, when day and night are the same length:
Let’s give it a twist:
That’s better. Now we can add some quarter days – Samhain (Halloween) at the top, Bealtaine (Mayday if your name is Jack) at the bottom, and Imbolg and Lúnasa in between.
All the gaps are six-ish weeks. This is how I spent time working on my story this year:
I got the idea from my mom, who is a clever human, and for anyone who’s been exposed to the world of tech it’s not a million miles away from sprint planning.
And… it kind of worked. Some things took longer than others, and I somehow thought I’d be all wrapped up by Lúnasa but sure what of it – I can make my own rules. So in nine or so spins of the moon I put together a book, and I reckon it’s pretty good. I mean, I’m happy with it, I’ve had it described to me as beautiful and very good and it made Mama C cry so that’s a result (sorry Mama).Â
I’m planning to do it again this year. Starting around the winter solstice (I didn’t win the lottery) and finding little targets along the way. There are no pictures in my next story, and it has a grown-up protagonist, if you can imagine such a thing. Three main actors, only two of whom will be humans. Or not, who knows – I haven’t written any of it yet. It might even be a love story. And it’s going to be historical and have some magic realisms. Uncharted realms. I am looking forward to getting started. But no pressure like, I’m enjoying reading season – I’ve loved this (thanks Lucy) and this (thanks Susan, Corcaigh Abú!) and this is my current obsession (thank you The Muse).
I might stop describing writing in these roundabout terms now and try to say how I feel about it all – which is another cycle. The moon goes around the earth goes around the sun and so our position in space spirals, like this:
And so does how I describe my world in words. We learned a new (to me) song in my singing group last week called On Yonder Hill and it’s a song about a wily hare but it’s also a gigantic metaphor for seven or eight centuries of colonial interruption. Say one thing and sing another. Sometimes I say I am happy or I am sad or I am confused and sometimes I say that things are heavy or things are light and sometimes I use sixty thousand words to express say something when fifty thousand words would be enough.
Where am I on my spiral? On the move, gan dabht, somewhere on the right side of not sharing enough, and heading in the right direction. The Muse would say I can be very literal which is true, and tricky too because maybe I’ll wait for the right words to say how I’m feeling at the expense of expressing anything at all, or maybe I’ll wait for my feelings to catch up with my vocabulary. Neither is ideal, really.
We lit a fire, for Samhain and Diwali, and we threw some old stuff into it and talked about intentions for the year ahead. We’ll carry them into the dark half of the year and see how they do over winter. I’m excited. I’ve burned more use-less habits and behaviours in other years, so I feel like I have more room this time around for changes. I feel ready. Confident? Satisfied, for sure. Open to small joys. Curious about new stories – the ones I’m reading and the ones I’m imagining. I feel connected to people who have the same grá for words that I have. I feel like I’m in a good place.
Sin é, now. Until next time, a chairde.
PaulÂ