“Hail Persephone, Goddess of Spring.” This line comes from the 1968 movie Sebastian, starring Dirk Bogarde and Suzannah York. It was made a year before I was born, and I must have stumbled across it one rainy afternoon, watching old movie reruns on BBC2 in my teens. I was a bit smitten with Dirk Bogarde and Errol Flynn back then. They were swashbuckling heroic characters who always saved the day and got the girl—just the kind of day-dreamy fantasy I needed to forget the woes of my home life at the time. The fact that they were older than today’s young heartthrobs made me wonder if I was trying to replace the missing father figure in my life—my dad—who had reluctantly abandoned ship, when I was seven.
That line stayed with me, even though I knew little about Persephone, beyond her being a character in Greek mythology. Curious as to why it had stuck with me, I googled her. Now I know that she was the daughter of Zeus, the chief god, and Demeter, the Goddess of Agriculture, and that she was abducted by Hades, the God of the Underworld. In her daughter’s absence, Demeter neglected her duties out of sorrow and the harvests failed, leading to famine. So it was agreed between Zeus and Hades that Persephone could spend half the year above ground with her mother, and half the year in the underworld.
According to Wikipedia: “The myth of her abduction, her sojourn in the underworld, and her cyclical return to the surface represents her functions as the embodiment of spring and the personification of vegetation, especially grain crops, which disappear into the earth when sown, sprout from the earth in spring, and are harvested when fully grown.”
I definitely feel like I sink into my own underworld when summer comes to an end. I think it’s the darkness of winter that I find the hardest, and the shortness of the days. I am an artist, a maker, a creator of things. I am a morning person, and I prefer to work in natural daylight. My body is very much in tune with the lengthening of the days, and I wake naturally with the sun. In the height of summer this means I am awake around 4:30am, and you will often find me in my studio by 5, leaving Craig to sleep until his alarm goes off.
In my previous home, we had a view of the horizon and I made a ritual of watching the sunrise daily, sitting outside in my dressing gown with a cup of tea and my faithful companion, Frank the Pug. It was a beautiful way to begin each day. Once the sun was up, I would sit at the kitchen table with my journal and spill my thoughts onto the page. I was always amazed by the clarity and inner wisdom I had access to in those moments.
Although I can no longer see the sun rise over the horizon where I am now, I do have a very seasonal cottage garden, and I track the year by the plants and flowers as they bloom and fade. First, the snowdrops, and then the crocus and daffodils signal the arrival of spring, appearing here and there in an ad hoc fashion. At the same time, the fruit trees blossom, which is always very exciting as the abundance of flowers indicates the success of the harvest to come. And of course, the beautiful magnolia trees adorn themselves in flame-like petals, which I make a point of admiring each day for the couple of weeks they last, good weather permitting.
Following them, and one of the first things to fill the garden with colour, are the baby blue forget-me-nots. Blue is my favourite colour, so I’m delighted when a sea of blue joy appears in the middle of my lawn, highlighting the central rose bed. It’s like a heavenly chorus that fills me with awe. They also remind me of all that I’ve loved and lost, and to be grateful for all the wonders currently in my life. The bluebells join them in the borders, giving the garden a woodland feel. As these start to go over, the alliums and wolfsbane pop up and come into bloom, along with the scented Wisteria that drapes the covered patio, adding to the glorious symphony of purples and blues. The changes are so fast I can hardly keep up with the comings and goings!
Spring is also the time when the weeds reappear and a summer-long battle begins. I try to live alongside them in my garden as they are too numerous and well established to eradicate entirely. And anyway, they are good for wildlife. I’ve also discovered many of them are edible, so I got quite excited a few weeks ago thinking I would keep them under control by eating them. But you can only add a little nettle, dandelion, and ground elder to a salad before making it too chewy and bitter. So I’m back to an evening routine of ten minutes a day pulling bindweed and other invaders.
Another exciting spring event in my garden is the unfurling of the ferns. They magically appear from their brown stumps and form the most incredible shapes and silhouettes as their coils unravel. I have a few different varieties and I love to use the leaves to impress in my ceramic items, each one then completely unique. I have to stop making this range during the winter once my supply of fronds has dried up, and switch to seed heads, which are also fun to use. But I do love the simplicity of the ferns. They also have a depth and juiciness to their greenness which gives the garden a lush, tropical vibe.
In fact, greenness is another prominent feature of spring that I love. One minute the world is brown, and within a few weeks it’s green—particularly here in the UK. This past weekend we motorbiked through the Cotswolds, and the vibrancy of greens in the rural countryside was dazzling. It’s the thing that strikes me whenever I return home from an overseas trip during the summer months. Green means home.
Summer is a full-on time for me, and I like to use every hour of daylight for meaningful productivity. So it’s probably a good thing that winter does eventually arrive and nature shuts shop for a while. I’m not sure I could cope with 16-hour days all year long. So although I feel sad when the nights begin to draw in, and it feels like my precious light is being gradually stolen from me, I try to meet it with gracious acceptance now.
I appreciate the time to slow down and recharge my batteries. To change my diet and do some slow cooking of hearty and wholesome soups and stews. To snuggle in front of the fire and relish sliding under the winter duvet with the electric blanket on. It reminds me to feel blessed and lucky that the coming of winter merely requires me to change my behaviour and not endure any real hardship.
But I still get a buzz of excitement when we are over the hump of winter and I sense the changing of the light. Spring is my happy season.
If you follow my Instagram, or belong to one of the various art journaling Facebook groups in which I participate regularly, you will know that I have not had an easy year. In fact it’s been over 5 years now since my world got turned upside down and I began the long hard process of restoring my soul.
It began with a huge loss, followed by an enormous amount of sadness and then loneliness. I hadn’t realised until this happened that my soul was in such a state of disrepair. I wasn’t deliriously happy, but I was bumbling along and life was ok, good in most parts actually. I had no inclination that it should have been any different, that I should have been different? Only when I was plunged into a place so dark did I realise how dimmed my inner light had become.
The hardest part of this journey back to me was to make the sad and difficult decision to divorce my husband of 23 years. We have two wonderful sons, both young adults now, and I was trying desperately to find a way to keep our family together. But for many reasons which I would come to discover and understand, our relationship had become toxic and I no longer had the energy and fortitude required to hold us together.
I threw myself a huge pity party and the worrying resulted in sleepless nights and the inability to focus on anything much besides my impending doom. This was when I realised that I had lost control of this project and there was no one else to fix it but me. My ‘go to’ rescuer (my now ex husband) was no longer at my disposal but I knew I needed to ask for help.
As I traverse the voids that the lifted floorboards have exposed and look up through the gaps in the ceilings I do wonder at the irony of the situation. Obviously my healing journey was not as complete as I thought it was. I had not done enough excavating, unearthing and revealing in order to fully restore. Well now I can literally see the dirt beneath the foundations and there is no other choice than to start rebuilding from the ground up. And I will be an active participant and guardian of this restoration and I will show myself and my life the respect it deserves. Bring it on!
2017 has been a big year! In fact if I had to look at it objectively some time down the line I would probably say it would rank among the most significant years of my life. I got divorced, saying goodbye to a marriage of 23 years, and I bought a house, the first I’ve owned by myself. And of course, being me, it’s a fixer upper, and I’m now in the early stages of a huge renovation project! New me, new house, big renovation projects both inside and out?
But despite this, the year has been punctuated by really positive things too. I attended a wonderful retreat in Italy with a very special friend, creating a travel journal with Lisa Sonora, a teacher I’ve been following for a few years now and wanting very much to meet in person. Of course the journal turned out to be as much about my own inner journey as much as the lovely town or Orvieto, but hey – ‘wherever you go…there you are?’. It was intense, but cleansing and healing too. Art journaling is now my ‘go to’ therapy of choice when it comes to working though difficult stuff.
Helping others is definitely the best antidote to a spot of the blues or a dose of self pity. My weekly sessions volunteering at the mental health recovery centre have been testament to that for me. I have witnessed real transformation in struggling souls though inspirational creative projects. It takes a chunk out of my week to put the time aside but it feels good. The same goes for the evening journaling classes I held during the second half of this year. The energy required to stay alert until 9.30pm was a challenge, but the reward was to see people come alive doing creative soul work and leave the sessions glowing.
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