I started the day greeting the dawn at home, in the garden, planting shallots. It’s traditional to plant them on the shortest day of the year and harvest them on the longest. Despite being generally an unconventional kind of person, eschewing tradition in favour of trying out the new, I decided to give it a go. After all, it’s probably good for the shallots. It will certainly help me to remember when they’re supposed to be ready for pulling up.

Our foremothers and fathers had considerably more sense and practical knowledge than most of us today can lay claim to. I never dismiss so-called old wives’ tales out-of-hand, either.

Gardening is, without doubt, for me a spiritual activity—I would never have started were it not for my pagan beliefs leading naturally to ever-increasing and challenging environmental awareness—and it was while I was digging the veg bed one last time before planting that I took the time to thank the gods for my beloved, my family, and my friends.

I also thanked them for bringing me new ways of thinking and of seeing the world, at a time in life—in my early 40s—when it is so easy for people to become set in their ways, walking fossils way ahead of their actual old age. It is also nearly one year (come December 29) since we moved to our current home, and there have been many things to be grateful for with regard to that: there’s the generosity of friends in helping to shift two tons of manure and topsoil; a big party of people turning up to lay siege to massively overgrown hedges back in February; and the furnishings welcomed but provided unasked-for by parents and siblings. And then there is the fact that this house has helped my beloved and I to deepen our relationship.

I gave my thanks for Mandrake, our marmalade cat, still being around, three months after being told he was about to die as a consequence of his FIV infection. He is doing great thanks to homeopathic medicines, a lot of loving attention and, I believe, the help of higher (or, as I usually prefer to say, universal) powers. I remembered friends lost to time, for now, perhaps not forever. And pets who were also friends—Dolly, Drusilla, Belsham, DJ… Many more were named. No need to list them here, but none are ever forgotten.

Don’t mistake the cataloguing of loved ones gone by as indicative of melancholia, or worse. This time of year, like Samhain in many respects, it’s important to pause and to take some deep breaths, and—most of all—to integrate the happy with the sad, the dark with the light, the winter with the summer. It’s the shortest day of the year, meaning things get lighter from this day forward. Winter is not as long as you might think. However you feel, good or bad, it will pass.

Life is a river of experience and the currents move fast.

Come next June my beloved and I will have been together 11 years. Incredible. I can tell you, there is always more to learn, there are always new and incredible depths of intimacy to reach for. If you stop trying, if you think this is all there is, it’s time to re-evaluate whether a relationship is right for you. I might also add, we’ve found that maintaining and encouraging the inner child, or what’s known in Feri as the Fetch, and cultivating one’s own innate insanity—revelling in being a bit, well, bonkers—helps to stop the pressures of life from bringing you down and keeping you down. I talk to the animals. You know. Kind of like Doctor Dolittle. Only, sadly, they don’t sing or enter into philosophical discourse. Ahem. They do, however, appreciate love and kindness, reminding us—well, certainly me–that the joy is in the giving of generosity perhaps far more than in the receipt. It is certainly its own reward. Good animal husbandry, like consideration of other people, simply makes me feel good. Everyone can make a positive difference for others, human and animal. All of the time.

The year started busy and it will end busy. We should be, and are, grateful for that. There’s more to do, there’s more we want. Of course there is. But the whole point of meditating on the Solstice at this time of year, for me at least, is to focus on your blessings already gifted to you, and the hope of blessings yet to come.

Every blessing to you all for the coming year. Just remember to be grateful always for the blessings already received.

Happy Yule! And thank you.