The building blocks

The early, dark, winter mornings continue and I’m in a comfort zone. I love this part of the year, then struggle a little with January and February. Right now, I’m inspired.

Today, I sat outside and respectfully asked if anyone had a message for me. Listening for a response is something I do almost automatically now but I thought I’d try putting it in writing. And to rediscover that process is, in itself, useful because I have to slow down, observe, feel, name. For me, it’s a somatic practice.

Smell

This morning, out here among farmed fields and pasture, it’s distinctive. There are ponies in the paddock to my left and - across the gardens to my right - a small stable yard (beyond charming; all cobbles and beams and ancient, cobwebby tack rooms). This morning the air, misty, smells of stables. Although I was never a ‘horse girl’, I did - thanks to my aunt, who was/is - work with horses for a while back in the early ‘80s, and some of my fondest memories are early starts in warm barns on a snowy yard, so this morning’s air lights up something in me that feels how our little christmas tree looks: twinkly. I sit with that past and present. My body smiles and relaxes. These days, my early morning animal interaction consists of sitting out here with the cat, but I’ll take it.

Taste

Forever my coffee. Probably, mostly, the only one I’ll have in a day, in the same cup I’ve used for this very purpose, every day since October 2018. It’s a ritual that awakens me to my day in more ways than just getting caffeinated. Either in my mind, or out loud, I acknowledge the coffee plants; the soya plants; the sun, the soil, the water that grew them; the clay that formed the cup; the power that heated the water; all the humans involved in getting this simple cup of coffee into my body every morning. Gratitude on a global scale and beyond.

Sound

The stream below our garden is flowing fast thanks to recent heavy rain upstream (well hello, Storm Bram). There’s a measuring point just here, where the water is channelled through a narrower space and then falls. Just a couple of feet, but enough to sound impressive, alive, and busy. The corvids are noisy. It’s still too dark for them to set out for the day but they’re warming up in the woods. They always sound like they’re arguing but I doubt they are. That said, I know from personal interaction that crows excel at ‘indignant’.

Should you be thinking that this rural idyll is an easy place to connect with the natural world, let me introduce you to my personal nemesis: the motorbike rider. It’s too early for the hum of distant car traffic to dull other noise, and when people aren’t travelling, sound does. This morning, it’s a lone biker who seems to be riding around in a circle. That damn engine dominated the soundscape for a good 15 minutes. Every time I thought,”Oh good, he’s disappearing into the distance…”, no. No he’s not. He’s revving up and still here. For a while, I played a little game of Guess Where Is He; attempting to match his gear changes and accelerations to the twists and turns in our lanes. That engine never seemed to get quieter. Not for what felt like A Very Long Time. All I could do was bring my focus back to the stream and the birds, and observe - with attempted (and failed) detachment - how bloody angry that engine noise makes me feel. Ironically, it was probably the most effective part of the whole experience! Ultimately, a wren flew up into the elder tree a few feet from me and - as is their way - sang so loudly and beautifully that I forgot all about Motorbike Mike. Oh, and a tawny owl too, across the field.

Vision

Our back garden is dark thanks to hedging and high walls, but above me is a moon that looks as if someone scored it down the middle and snapped it in half; a perfect semi-circle. Then Jupiter, Castor and Pollux. The outline of leafless trees against the soft light - I love how they look. And I’m reminded always of the comparison between the trunk-branch-twig and our pulmonary blood vessel systems. We are all different but the same. Of the same.

Touch

Artemis, my cat, circles this small back garden and checks back in with a rub against my leg, over and over. She’s (at least partially, and probably fully) Arabian Mau, a ‘natural breed’. Among their alleged characteristics is a dog-like tendency to follow their human around and she certainly does that. Like a daemon in Lyra’s world, she is never far from me. Besides her warmth, I feel the damp in the air. We live surrounded by water here, and there’s often a low mist when the temperatures are right. My experience with mist and voices is something I’ve written about in the past and won’t revisit right now, but for me there’s a consciousness in that water. It is numinous. I am aware of the numen and in it, the infinite possibilities.

At this point, a few deeper breaths, nothing dramatic, settle me into where I am, and then I go for that sixth sense. That voice, or knowing, that tells me what I need to hear today.

Knowing

Imagine you’re in a room with a lot of people, all talking at once. Like a party, or a busy restaurant. You’re trying to hear the voice of a particular person. You know them well and you know what you’re listening for. Scanning the sounds around you, you’re filtering out the ones who aren’t that person, and then, there! There they are. Tune your focus and listen to what they’re saying.

That’s what it’s like. My head is full of voices, mostly my own thoughts, and then a lot of nonsense that my ND brain likes to replay on loops, but as I filter, I focus, and eventually there’s the knowing. Like when someone speaks to you and they’re finished, but their words are still resonant in your mind. Fresh. New information, ready to be filed. In a voice that’s not yours, not the podcaster, not the Audible narrator, not your mother. It’s spirit. Or spirits. When you feel it, you know it. You just know.

This morning, that voice reminded me that the numinous quality of the mist, that I feel against my skin, and connect with in my soul, is potential. That the future is all just potential. Building blocks with which we create.

Just as the wren will take old leaves, moss, fur and twigs to build a beautiful nest, so we can take the raw materials of pure potential and possibility and make real a future we’ve imagined. That’s what human animals are really skilled at when they remember how.

Calendars are among our less interesting inventions, I think, but here we are. It’s likely that you and I live by the one that says we’re nearing the end of what we call a year. We’ll move from the period of time we call December, in a bigger chunk we called 2025, into a period called January in a larger bit we refer to as 2026. It’s all fairly meaningless but I appreciate the need to organise, and create common experience. I also think the collective energy around these agreed metrics does make them energetic portals of a kind.

What do I see emerging from the numen for me as I move into 2026? So much. But it’s simplified, streamlined, decluttered if you will. For the first time in ages, I have a word for the year: Presence.

Present in my own life, this place, the possibility. So I must get to building.

How about you?¹

1. If you’re thinking about personal or professional worldbuilding for 2026 and could use some help, take a look at my friend Susannah’s gorgeous annual gifts, Unravel Your Year, and Find Your Word - they can be downloaded here.