Winter Light

Let us Journey into 2025

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Now on to this week’s musings…

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Winter in the UK is a time of darkness, where moments of clear skies and the brightness of a cold winter sun or the crispness of stars is a welcome sight. I find it curious, considering that the calendar is a construct, that we choose to celebrate the changing of the year in the midst of this darkness. Yet here we find ourselves, standing in 2025, with months to go before the bright green of spring returns colour to the land.

It doesn’t surprise me that the festive days many of us celebrate in over this period are full of light. The winter solstice, which marks the longest night of the year and ushers in the lengthening of days and the welcome return of the light. Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, which marks the rededication of the temple of Jerusalem and is observed by the light of 9 candles. Christmas, during which we fill our homes and towns with illuminated decorations. Again and again, during the cold month of December we light candles and turn on fairy lights, banishing the dark from the door.

After spending Solstice in the wonderful company of friends gathered around the dining table I travelled up to London for Christmas with my family. It was our first Christmas in my hometown since my Mum moved to the southwest over a decade ago. London at Christmas embraces the joy of light, tress and shops and streets and people’s home decked in twinkly joy. Despite being more aware than ever of the planetary impact of these lights, I was uplifted by their beauty. They truly make the city shine.

London in Light

When I came home from London, I followed the lights through Tehidy wood to Rogue Theatres winter show. Then in the first days of 2025, I walked the paths of The Lost Gardens of Heligan after dark, where illuminated plants and animals fill the garden with magic and wonder. The care, thought, and artistry that goes into the displays at Heligan were the perfect final celebration for this festive season.

They reminded me of the more-than-human world that shares the winter darkness with us. They reminded of the bulbs, seeds, and roots sleeping in the cold earth, waiting for just enough warmth to grow. They reminded me of the animals hibernating and of those hunting among the meagre offerings of winter. The chef Tommy Banks, in his beautiful cookbook calls this season the Hunger Gap. When the hedgerows and fields don’t yet have food to forage or harvests to bring in. I’m sure I’m not the only one looking forward to the year’s first wild garlic and gorse petals.

Light sculptures at the Lost Gardens of Heligan

At Rogue, Old Man Winter invited us to tie wishes to the trees. Clootie trees are a tradition in Cornwall, with people making wishes tied with rags and ribbons to trees near holy wells. Every winter at Rogue a grove of trees is wrapped in white as we tie our wishes together. Old Man Winter reminded us that wishes followed by action have every hope of coming true. He told us we are ancestors, gathered together to make wishes for the future.

I spent yesterday writing and editing the first major document for my PhD. Which means I spent yesterday trying to find language to explain the importance of creating art that visualises the immense and catastrophic loss of a 6^th mass extinction. As you might imagine finding the language for the kind a loss is challenging. I suspect the only thing that is going to be more challenging is creating the art I’ve committed myself to making. Challenging, painful, complex, and dark. Dark as the solstice night, dark as the longest winter.

The Clootie Trees, Wishing Fairy, and Old Man Winter

At Rogue I tied a wish for the more-than-human world to the tree, and a wish for my PhD. At Solstice and Christmas and Hanukkah I whispered my wish into the dark. Surrounded by the lights of winter festivities, I saw hope and beauty and possibility in the action I am taking to make my wish come true. I’ve wrapped myself in the lights and can only hope they will carry me through winter, and through the dark, through the challenge.

I hope the lights carry you too.

Now let us journey onwards.