Mindfully Stylish 🌷

As I looked out at the December landscape, the browns and greens and greys, and the silver unexpected slivers of water from the floods, I felt that the whole of the country was reflecting back to me my own internal retreat and rest. And I felt at peace. I was in the right season at the right time in my life. Some people say we should believe we are always where we are meant to be, and there is truth in this, but some seasons of our lives are much harder than others. My therapist calls it the weaves of the tapestry, that even in times of difficulty if we can poke our heads out from the trench we have found ourselves in, all the work we have done is still there, but we must take the time to look. 

There are moments, much like these pictures I’ve gathered throughout the Winter months, I feel barren and muddy. But just as the light shines down on Canary Wharf, there is a painfully beautiful nostalgia here. For the hundreds of days just gone, for all the unknown promises of the New Year and saying goodbye to the last, the tendrils of memories reaching past Christmas and placing us slightly dizzily in the raw, fresh first days of this new season.

Like the Yule Log burned on the Winter Solstice, I have been dried out, decorated with dying things and spark and crackle irritably in the fire holding other people’s dreams between the cracks in my boughs.

Everything feels dead and yet the Earth is churning Her mechanisms unseen beneath the soil. Even when things are hard, I am nearer the top of the trench, toiling and scrambling to get out, mud caking and flying around my boots, rather than at the bottom, frozen, in pain and completely mute. I know now what I have to do. The Sun is still there, as are the smatterings of greenery that have survived reminding us that Mother Nature never truly dies but merely falls into a deep, deep sleep. And then there are snowdrops that peak through the frigid ground, little soldiers of Spring, making everything better.

So cosy up, and let’s go on a glittering tour of England’s frosty cities and icy countryside bedecked in Winter blues, greens, pinks and whites. You never know, we might even see some snow…

In Love&Light, FS XOX