In it there are irises

& a message by the sea

Venus is morning star, in her sixth month, though there aren’t very many clear morning skies to see her in. Robins sing with more promise now at the hour of her setting. They make up for the hidden star.

The driveway up to my carriage house home is white with snowdrops. Today in my own garden I found the source of a wondrous scent, like gardenias, which I had been catching wafts of for days. A flowering bush whose name I don’t know, with tiny flowers like a mock orange.

Two friends came round and I lit a fire in the dish under the big holly tree, and we ate cake and crisps and burned up old greenery and later, alone, I prayed and also put written prayers in the fire, and devotions, and thought about the hillfort mound whose spring water I can hear pouring into an ancient horse trough in the courtyard; water from the belly of the bronze age hill, milk of the old mother, the new mother, the midwife mother St. Brigid who I can see in the fire dish as it heats deeper and deeper into the night, the embers shifting and bright— out there as I type they are still smoldering.

I leave for California in two days, and so I am releasing much to the fire tonight, and also filling it with hope both personal and collective. Travel always feels a kind of shapeshifting to me; I begin to become Californian again a week before I leave. I am both snowdrops and the first primroses, and the pacific iris just starting to unfurl. I saw a tomcat in a green field on the other side of the hedgerow today and thought I was seeing a bobcat, and had to remind myself I was still in England.

I’ve been thinking a lot these last weeks about how certain years-long journeys are elaborate mazes that spin us round and round, take us up and down mountains and break our hearts again and again, until we feel so lost and have given over so much of ourselves, that we don’t realize that we are suddenly at our own doorstep again, and it’s actually simple, and all we really want is to raise chicks under a heatlamp in the shed and put them in the coop that’s been sitting there getting overgrown with jasmine vines for six years, and let them flourish and lay a hundred eggs.

Maybe all the stories (and possibly even Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey) turn out to be right and the whole quest was made to bring us back to where we started; back to the place we might have run from for years. Maybe we go out simply to let go of everything that was keeping us from home—whether that’s a physical place, or an interior place, or likely both at once.

So, I’m kneeling at the fire, between winter and spring, wondering. Watching the alembic of the turning season. Feeling home speak to me from the very heart of my heart. In it, I see, there are irises.

Meanwhile, I recently spent several days by the sea near Hope Cove in south Devon; good medicine for my winter-weary bones. The stars were a white fur in the dark at night, because there was no light pollution. Sunrise was a revelation. I read a novel, which hasn’t happened in a while and felt delicious. New ideas came through for a precious writing project which I turned off all the lights to work on, and used only candles. Runa and I walked and walked and walked and ran around in the sand and were thoroughly happy because of the sea air and big open fields.

On one of our daily walks across the cliffs and down through the little hawthorn forest to a secret cove with tumbled quartz stones and shark eggs, a thought struck me which I felt compelled to record. I wasn’t sure why, just that I needed to speak it aloud to get the heft of what I was feeling and what I meant, and then I kept speaking, and some other interesting thoughts came out—about the particular hidden seeds in us that only germinate through forest fires both literal and metaphoric, about the underlying patterns of wholeness in both ecosystems and our hearts, about what in us can never be destroyed— and all the while you can hear the wind and the cold waters rushing and my boots clomping along. It felt like a voice message I might leave to a patient dear friend who enjoys receiving a random Sylvia-walk-musing, so I thought I would share it with you here, as if each of you were on the walk with me.

NEWS -

Last week my interview with Ayana Young of For the Wild was released. It was a wide-ranging, thought-provoking conversation we had, and it’s an honor to share it with you.

Stay tuned for the first chapter of my new Mother Animal series, which I’m happily gathering together now; it will be published here for paid subscribers on February 18th. Already different threads of story are flying at me from every direction— women clutching palm trees while in labor, calling on old birth goddesses; paleolithic hunting women gathering babies from the clay…

artwork by Catherine Sieck

Finally- there are still a few more spaces in my upcoming in-person workshop on Vancouver Island with Nao Sims in a month. Two days of dancing, writing, stories about swans, good food, and the deep blue sea…. You can read full details here.