like a forest fire

Hey earthlings.

I bring good news : there is always more love.

I’ve just spent a year bundled in consecutive winters, weathering dwindling light days in both hemispheres.

From Southside to North I’ve moved from bone-numbing loneliness to a household of ten. To the taste of firewood and blankets, laughter snow and wine. The weeks passed in our hibernation pod, and we all reached the same conclusion.

How could we live any other way?

Some kind of sacred geometry did its mojo. Of course it matters who - I also learned, it matters how many. There’s a golden ratio where the love and creative inspiration gets humming, fresh air goes round gets us ever closer curiouser.

I’ve been in many, beautiful group gatherings. But this?

The stars aligned. Inexplicable. I kinda want to cradle that love close to my chest and never breathe a word about it, the way you know you cannot breathe too close to the perfection of a snowflake…

Haha! Try not talking about outrageous blinding love!

The cats purred around our ankles on the porch. Tea steamed up from jars with frayed stickers, from the honey hives just down the road. Artemi mused that he’d been trying to make this happen for years. A winter nest, to rest in the comfort of each other, and nurse sparks during the great darkness. He was the last to join, stumbled sideways into being invited to his dream come true on a silver platter.

The hearth of our hearts was like a forest fire. It kept us warm through anything. It blazed through getting stuck in snow blizzards, power cuts water cuts no food crashing computers dying relatives. That love kept us warm through it all. I have a hundred pictures of the faces of our snowy mountain - and of us, asleep in a pile like a litter of puppies.

I’ve spent years in settings where a group gathers, transmutes, then disperses. Every time I wonder - how realistic is it, to hold the torch alone once we have parted? I think of the penguins in the deep winter, forming a great pool of bodies pressed to each other, and rotating the outskirts where none can survive for long. I was raised in a culture that knows only the outskirts, the clipped units of small alliances that try to magic themselves into providing what only a village can.

I was blessed with months cocooned in the warm centre.

I emerge in that wobbly-legged frailty and excitement of something so beautiful, cracked open and dispersing.

sending us out to the four winds, to do who knows what.

How lucky are we?

#community #family #blessings #hibernation #wintering #cycles #alwaysmorelove