New Year's Eve

It's New Year's Eve, the last day of the old year.

2012 ended with eating (including Florentines, thanks to Sue's recipe),

drinking and making merry with family and friends. The making merry was full of muddy walks and games.

I have made many changes in 2012. My work now takes up less of my time and has greater variety. I travelled to and lived for a little while in a different beautiful city. I started making art works and writing. I have continued to try to live more in the moment and cherish the moments of serenity, joy and even the pain that brings as it means I am learning to bear even the difficult feelings that are part of life. I have made new friends and seen more of old ones and shared in the things that are important to them. I spent time with my godson. I went on holiday with my precious brother. And, for the first time, we grew an apple and tomatoes.

Yesterday, as we walked through London, I saw this winter blossom growing in a graveyard. It will see us through the grey skies of winter and into the new days of 2013.

Happy Christmas

Here is something beautiful.

A Year Ago

A year ago, I was packing up my classroom resources, clearing my desk and trying not to panic as the farewells to colleagues and pupils came ever closer. I had decided to leave: to travel, to do some further training, to be explorative. And, by December, the leaving was upon me. I knew I would see colleagues again for they were also friends. But pupils, no. This was goodbye.

They blew me away. There was the cake in the shape of a book, made by a class with whom I had been reading Romeo and Juliet, and which featured a brilliantly adapted quotation.

There was my sixth form class, with whom I had shared the pain of First World War poetry on wintry Monday mornings, and who made the most of their knowledge of Othello to say goodbye.

As well as being a teacher, I was also a tutor. I had shown my tutor group round the school when they were still at primary school. Several years on, I had to tell them I was going. I knew it would be difficult and indeed it was, especially seeing the wry smile from the child who didn't live with mum and dad and whose smile revealed that this was what adults do: leave.

Writing this post recalls for me my sadness at leaving the young people I had taught: who had exhausted me, delighted me, made me laugh, made me cajole and made me cheer them on, over and over again. But I knew I needed to go: to blossom and explore. I don't regret it but I can remember the sadness.

Christmas twigs

I seem not to have many words at the moment. I think this might be because I have spent a lot of time with people over the last week - in the classroom; visiting friends who are expecting or who have small children; listening to a Quaker friend talk about her life for a profile I am writing. It feels as if there has been a huge amount of talking. So it was was lovely to quietly arrange some gold and black twigs in a vase and hang paper snowflakes on them.

Frost

Just a picture today:

Moons

This morning as my partner and I left for work in the dark there was the most beautiful sliver of a crescent moon. It was big and bright in the sky. I don't have a photo of it, but I was reminded of two lovely moons in Venice almost a year ago. I saw the crescent moon beneath the crane near the Accademia at the end of my first week there, and the full moon across the Giudecca canal just before I returned to London at the end of the month. Such still, cold and beautiful winter moons.

Glitter

Inspired by this post I decided to have a go at making one myself to cheer that dark hallway. And I'm not sure the results are calm but they're certainly bright:

Glimmer and gleam

On a winter afternoon our hallway, never very bright, is the first part of the flat to darken. But, sometimes, some light finds its way in, falling through the glass above the door, gleaming on the door frames, glimmering on pictures.

And light appears elsewhere too, glinting through the tree at the end of the garden.

These flickers of light are pale and cool. I'm so glad to have seen them.

Apple Cycle

The apple tree arrived in the post just over a year ago, a birthday and Christmas present from my partner. I love blossom - in hedges, in orchards, in city streets - and had been inspired by Fenton House's orchard and fruit and vegetable garden.

Our garden is tiny so I knew it could only be one tree: this espalier Egremont russet.

It had just a few leaves when it arrived in November, but by spring it was green and blossoming.

And then, though I wasn't supposed to let it in its first year, an apple grew. One day, in early November, I came home from work and my partner said to me in mock horror: there's been a disaster and he pointed out of the kitchen window at the tree. No apple! But all was well: it had become a windfall. Its time must have been ripe because it was sweet and crunchy and we were able to celebrate our first apple harvest.

Now the tree is almost bare again, just a few leaves clinging to its branches.

First Sunday of the Month

On the first Sunday of the month, before our Quaker Meeting for Worship, a small group of us gather upstairs for an hour of a guided meditation and sharing called Experiment with Light. We meet in a small room with windows looking out at the wood behind the Meeting House.

It is the second Experiment with Light group I have belonged to and in both groups I have felt such honesty, trust, support and care.

After the meditation has finished we have a few further minutes of quiet before people start to share, if they wish, what arose for them. I always feel so blessed to be able to sit quietly in this beautiful, simple room, with the light falling through the diamond-paned windows onto the white walls and dark bookshelves, and the sight of the trees outside.

A Pause

Yesterday was a flying about kind of day, hurrying from one place to another, waving arms frantically at buses that didn't stop, shoving brownies into the oven and hoping they would cook more quickly than the recipe said. But then I arrived early for a tutorial. I walked towards open space, where the low early-afternoon sun was buttering the sky golden behind the trees. I looked at the frost on the grass and leaves and paused.