Or best of all, the cosy and the mysterious will take turns by the firelight, mixing their roles within the very same tale.ĭuring Christmas 2013, with the clan gathered together, there was little opportunity for private reading – but we pocketed ourselves away in those safely muffled days, and watched in shared contentment the season’s offering of films, many of them the stuff of the stories above. Or, conversely, the tales invited to the hearth will beam with congenial mirth, placing around my shoulders a blanket against the freezing winds outside. Clustered in this corner jostle stories tinged with the Gothic, with explorations of rooms behind locked doors, the creaking stairway the chilly breath that extinguishes the candle. Ghosts and memories haunt these places, hovering close to their traditional places by the winter hearth. The pattern also traces its way into dark, mud-splashed streets, to crumbling houses filled with mystery their gables and chimneys jutting jaws of stubborn secrecy. My thoughts turn to Magic, Imagination to back-of-the-wardrobe doorways whose frosted hinges crack open into eerie, snow-covered enchantment to the silence of the forest witches on brooms armoured bears goblets of fire signs of power hobbits dodging dragons with trickster words. Nearing Christmas, maybe around solstice, the pattern gathers around light-gleaming colours of gold, green, red – firesides and indoor-coddled trees, laden with glittering reflection. I pick up another book, and see the pages ahead as another portal into the grass, water, trees, mountains, clouds the slippery cloak of the eel winding its way around me – delivering me into animal worlds.Īnd then, the season will turn. I want to take records, to ponder, to be a naturalist, a citizen scientist to look for the tiniest detail on a goldfinch’s wing the last glint of a dragonfly on a leaf the bloom of fungi in rotting wood.įor a short while, my reading turns almost wholly towards nature writing, natural history, landscape, sky.

I want to be outside, or by the window – to be watching, noticing, swept up in the passing.

I’ve noticed that around the autumn – September through to November – the excitement of the turning globe, the tightening drawstring of migration, the freefall of the trees – and the belt-loosening outbreath of the land as it settles down beneath its knee-blanket of frost – all turns me outward. Quartering the year with rolling colours of moods kaleidoscope changes that meld thoughts, like fragments of stained glass, into patterns – never exactly the same twice, but falling loosely into the same corner of the year same time, same place. There’s something I’ve noticed about my reading in recent years.

Clarissa pinkola books