Under a Winter’s Sun

A very Happy New Year to you! An early MindLetter this week, to let you know that all mindfulness events begin again today.

Lunchtime drop-ins return tomorrow, and run Mondays and Fridays 1.10-1.50pm throughout the semester. There will be the odd week off; we will always contact you to let you know if there will be no session.

My Mindfulness Course for Students runs on Wednesdays starting 21^st January. This afternoon class runs for 8 sessions, and is a really good option for students looking for  structured support across the semester. Do pass on to those you think might benefit. 

I am teaching three Saturday Day Retreats this semester; these are gentle, restorative days that run 11am-4pm online. The first is Saturday February 21st. 

For other events, including the monthly Community Class, have a look through the mindfulness webpages. Any questions, do get in touch.

For this week's MindLetter - I only had to go outside...

Walking Hope, our shadows are long on the beach. It could be seven o’clock on a summer’s evening, but it is ten on a wintry morning and my fingers tingle with cold inside my gloves. The sky is clear and blue; the sun is bright above the horizon, and here it will stay, pearlescent, in and out of cloud, until it begins to dip in a few hours’ time. ‘I don’t know how you manage with the lack of sunlight,’ a friend wrote to me a couple of weeks back, visiting Dumfries, and the thought, unnaturally cheerful, went through my mind: what lack?

This winter, I am practising a new relationship with the dark, the cold, that low sun whose morning greeting barely touches the lawns crispy with frost. I think less about how much I resent days lived mostly in the black of night, and more about how the earth is tilting on its axis at this time of year in the northern hemisphere, away from the sun, out towards the great expanse of space. In my mind’s eye the Earth spins, tilts, swoops in its cosmic dance around the burning star. I can almost see the heat leaving the land, radiating into the immense dark. I tell myself that, meteorites aside, this is the closest most of us will get to the depths of the cosmos. By placing a dreich winter’s day in such enormity of context, I hope that I can keep a sense of wonder alive, while temperatures hover around freezing, until those tricking minutes of January daylight thaw into the great stream of brightening that heralds spring.

I refuse, too, to relinquish Christmas. If the great traditions of the world can hold their festivities at varying times across this season, I see no reason why I should not extend my small tradition well past Epiphany. Each day I take a biscuit from the lebkuchen packet; each night I curl up with Nigel Slater’s Christmas Chronicles. The fairy lights, cards and baubles still adorn the bookshelves. I think about making my own mincemeat, continuing Christmas by preparing for the next. Nigel suggests letting it sit for three months, but there’d be no harm in eleven. I’ve never had better puddings than the ones from a year or two back, although 2013’s, forgotten at the back of the pantry, was admittedly a step too far when deployed in 2025. A cosmic sense of scale can only feed us so literally. 

In the autumn, to muster myself, I re-read Katherine May’s Wintering, its lyrical rehabilitation of this harshest season. Winter is not just for surviving, she writes. We humans need its rest and repose; the trees, plants, shrubs whose filigree stand stark against the golden turquoise sky need the cold and dark. Now, I breathe in air so fresh it is almost painful; I delight in the bright red of haws and hips. It’s grim, though, when my storage heaters don’t work as they should, last summer’s new smart-meter the culprit. A roster of faceless supplier caseworkers drop into my inbox without resolution, and I think to myself, I should be sleeping in a hollow tree, with a tail wrapped round my nose.

This is a time of year that requires imagination, curiosity, tradition. Leaning into winter means re-reading A Christmas Carol for the first time since school; my sister sends me an electric vest (such a thing exists!); thus far into Christmas Chronicles – and I am only in November – Nigel Slater recommends brandy, in regular doses. To these, warming my internal hearth, I add ‘January’ as penned by my favourite writers. I go to the pages of John Lewis-Stempel, whose breath fogs while pheasants call in freezing field or somnolent wood. In a moment’s inspiration, I discover this exhibition by Victoria Crowe. I’m two years too late, but her low winter suns, gleaming moons, and white snow patterns are just what I want to see today. When vistas are grey on every horizon, and we can’t tell morning from noon, art placed in time helps us place ourselves.

May our bookshelves, artworks, the company of good people and good dogs, stars on frosty nights, and the golden sun low over the beach, all tide us through this winter. It has its own magic, and by the time we’ve fully succumbed to its spell, spring will be here again.

Warm wishes

Kitty