Winter

Here in England, in the northern grey climate, my body adjusts to the seasons with deeper colour and more significant notice than ever before. It is the damp, and it is the English disposition. They get to me, and I eat and I eat to keep warm, and still I am pinched and pale like a medieval vampire, and it's not bad, it just is. The people who were born here, who know this as home and as life and as mother, they thrive in it! They are silkies, grey like the sky and the sea, unconcerned about a slim image, lovin' their fried fish.
I recently read All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, and he speaks of how the land of one's birth shapes the persona of a man, and that persona cannot just be transplanted, it does not thrive in another land...its body does not respond, does not learn the love of that land, it returns home eventually.
When the west was young and wild we could feel that, but for us in this strange millennium, what if home is not land? What if home is shifting along with the fluids of the body and the waves of the mind, unstable, influenced, changing.... Questions of home and bodies and land, they are important to the human life, and they are a big part of this English adventure.
It was good to be home in the land of my birth over Christmas, to be home in the space of my heart in Turkey; It is good now to be home in the nest of my lover and my children, to adventure into fresh senses of home in this new moon.
Tomorrow begins my whirling dervish training....land, bodies, home, all shifting, all turning, a universe to fly through. ~Joy for winter~ Peace in the falling Snow.