nature

By closing my eyes, however briefly, and resting my thoughts on the core of my perception, I can gain some of the peace that meditation brings me. I have come to think of it as prayer, although I ask for nothing, and speak to no one within it. It is a profoundly non-verbal experience, a sharp breath of pure being amid a forest of words. It is an

In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don't ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don't dare to show the way that it ravages us. A sharp wintering, sometimes, would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our life are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of

‘Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a period of humiliation or

This was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds, and between two phases of the year, when worshippers were just about to cross a boundary but hadn't yet done so. Samhain was a way of marking that ambiguous moment when you didn't know who you were about to become, or what the future would hold. It was a celebration of limbo.

Our

At first, I thought the black birds were crows, but I was mistaken. They had to be closer to cormorants, maybe shags. … I could see some of them, clumped together, staring at the factory. They looked slick as oil, like if you wrung one by the neck you’d get black ink all over your hands. They were floating in brackish water, where the river spills

Chapter Two begins with our narrator standing on a bridge watching a clump of black birds near the factory. They struggle to identify the birds or if such a bird should be living in the area. They are compared to ‘oil’, which can be potentially lethal to water birds (https://www.birdrescue.org/our-work/research-and-innovation/how-oil-affects-birds/), all leading us again to feel a sense of unease with the factory’s relationship to the nature, hinting that it is an unnatural and potentially harmful environment.

The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and

The bridge has two lanes of car traffic flanked by wide footpaths. In the time it took our group to cross, we saw at least five buses, three excavators with their shovels tucked downward like the heads of sleeping giraffes, one concrete mixer, five vehicles loaded with some kind of heavy equipment, and too many cars to count. Maybe half of them

We learn that there is an orientation hike (‘a training and networking event for new hires’ p9) taking place at the factory which is drawing to a close as it is now the evening. The group is standing on a large bridge near the southern face of the factory. We learn that the bridge is extremely busy with cars and many industrial vehicles. We wonder what the factory could need such equipment for, and what products they are making there, considering the only job that we know of so far involves only shredding documents all day.

The narrator compares the excavators - a tool essentially for destroying the earth - to the gentle image of a sleeping giraffe - mostly friendly, non-territorial creatures. The harsh industrial image is juxtaposed against the tender natural. It is a lifeless and mechanical scene with a little sense of human emotional presence.

‘We like to imagine that it's possible for life to be one eternal summer, and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves, We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun; an endless, unvarying high season. But life's not like that. Emotionally, we're prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in

Some people thrive on a little sleep deprivation, but I do not. I now know that I can achieve far more after nine hours than I can in the spare time afforded by a short night. Sleeping is my sanity, my luxury, my addiction. …

And winter sleeps are the best. I like my duvet thick and my bedroom cold, so that I have a chill to snuggle against. Unlike