the fourth day

snow-covered trees against a pale blue-pink winter sunset

it’s a marathon, not a sprint

TOPICAL: this is part of The Cycle of the Seasons series


Usually Sundays are my day off from everything, but right now there are important things to take care of each day, so I didn’t have a proper day off. There will be time for those later. So instead, I floated between things and lent a hand here and there.

I discovered an incredibly good audio adaptation of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. I haven’t read the entire series, so there have been things in the episodes that were brand new to me, but many of them felt familiar. If you have the time or inclination, I wholeheartedly recommend it. The BBC’s link for it is here and I am listening to it with my usual podcast app, so I believe it’s probably easy to find. The first episode came out on December 19th, and each day since there’s a new episode. I believe it is a twelve-episode series.

Hmm. Interesting.

It was a little tricky today in our cocoon in the snow. We are enough days into this process that the initial burst of beginning energy has begun to wane, and we are feeling tired, sore, and a little cranky. This is normal, especially in a house full of chronically ill people with our daily mystery number of spoons clutched in our fists. It’s taken us years of trying and failing to understand how to inhabit bodies that do not follow any of the rules very well, and which are often extremely fucking confusing and let us down when we need them to pull through instead.

Hopefully, tomorrow we will all feel a bit better. Hopefully we can forgive our brains and our bodies for reacting to stress like they do. Hopefully we can take some deep breaths and shake the darkness off.

The sun has stood still since the solstice on the 21st. Tomorrow, we will finally gain one more minute of daylight, and the light will wax, moments at a time, until the summer solstice in June; when the sun will stand still and daylight will slowly wane throughout the green and the heat and the harvests, until we arrive back at this point again, spiraling upward, ready to do the Work once more.

May you find a quiet delight in the natural cycles of the earth.

— Nix


Our days traditionally begin at sunset. The darkness is all around us but we are safe here together inside these walls that we have fortified with love and with sacrifice.

featured image is a photo by Christiaan Huynen on Unsplash

Nix Kelley
Co-parent to multiple kids. Writer. Death doula. Member of the Order of the Good Death. Seeker on the Path of Light. Queer, non-binary, & trans.

Thoughts?

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