Heading into winter...

A mini almanac post to embrace the new season

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

Salted (adjective): having developed a resistance to disease by surviving it.

Season (Northern Hemisphere): Winter

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Upcoming Moons: Next New Moon 23rd November (a great time to journal your ‘wishes’ for the month to come!) Next Full Moon 8th December (known as the Cold Moon)

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My Tarot Card Pick for You: Ace of Cups (beautifully modelled by a cosy Monty-Blue)

Keywords offered by the Ace of Cups (known as Ace of ‘Shells’, in this deck ‘Spiritsong Tarot’ by Paulina Fae, published by U.S Games 2017): Happiness, Abundance, Health, Love, Creativity, Compassion. Ace of Shells is about gliding with a sense of serenity, just as the sea turtle illustrated. Move at your own pace and stay true to your path. Tune in to your inner feelings and allow them to feed your sense of self-expression, on the outside.

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Book Club Read: This last few weeks I’ve devoured anything with words in it! I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Giver of Stars’ by Jojo Moyes (2019). Boy do I wish they’d make a film of it. It almost reads like a screenplay, absolutely beautiful, evocative setting and characters. I also read ‘The Way of the Fearless Writer’ by one of my favourite non-fiction authors and teachers, Beth Kempton (2022). I’ve had this on pre-order for most of this year and on arrival it hasn’t disappointed. If you are a writer, in any form (journal fan, published writer, author, copywriter), please read this and then read it again. It’s certainly a book I’m going to have to make notes in and scribble all over (gasp!)

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Element: Water

1st December sees the beginning of meteorological winter in the Northern Hemisphere and the start of ‘water’ season, as I see it. I like to associate winter with the element of water through my yoga classes. Water evokes words such as ‘flow’, ‘ebb’, ‘ooze’, ‘trickle’, ‘stream’ and ‘advance’.

Here are some ways you can find, and keep, your flow, as we start to move into another busy festive season:

• reduce your carbon footprint - and your overwhelm - by reducing the amount of emails you send and receive. Did you know that if we globally each sent just one less email per day that would save the equivalent in CO2 of over 81,000 flights from Bristol to Madrid! Try cleaning out your junk/spam, clearing your deleted items, and sending files as hyperlinks, rather than attachments (which keeps the CO2 lower) to feel better about your inbox.

• unplug, disconnect and shut down. If you are lucky to have people in your life, face-to-face, that are close enough to hug, then focus on those for the coming festive weeks and leave the online world to lie fallow for a while. It will all be there to pick back up when you’re good and ready (I’m on my third-winter-in-a-row Instagram and Facebook break right now and it’s glorious)

• start to jot down in your notebook the things, people, places, activities, that have helped you evolve and grow for the better this year. We still have a little way to go until the end of the year, but it’s ideal to take notice now, so you can prepare yourself for more of that good stuff in 2023.

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Health and Fitness: It’s been pretty mild here in the south west of the UK…until the last couple of days. I still haven’t been tempted by a post-October/pre-April sea swim however and my swims have been confined to once a fortnight in a very small indoor community pool (but at least it’s perfectly heated). It feels so good to stretch out in the water and reminds me how swimming truly does use every muscle. Now that my physical and mental health feel at more like my usual capacity, I’ve also been really enjoying a 15 minute burst of a Barre-inspired HIIT at 6.30am every weekday morning (with a great playlist to help - I’ve been obsessively listening on repeat to Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ (oh the lyrics!) as well as this very random playlist I created for Winter Inspiration. Plenty of expletives, but sometimes you need a bit of angry ragey sweariness to balance out the gentle.)

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Journalling Prompt:

Q. Summarise 2022 so far, for you personally (ignoring global events if possible) in just 10 bullet point single words.

Reorganise your 10 words on a scale of ‘very positive’ through ‘neutral’ to ‘very negative’ (if you have any).

How does the overall picture look? What do you need more of in these last 6 weeks of 2022, to further improve the overall picture?

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With salty wishes for a cosy few weeks, wherever you are. Also, how do you like this ‘almanac’ style format for these letters? It sits very comfortably with my highly-seasonal, multipassionate body and brain! Here for your comments or thoughts, as always. I’d love to hear from you. Pop it below.

x Luisa

P.S I had another feature published by the wonderful Editor-in-Chief Melanie Sykes in The Frank Magazine a couple of weeks ago. It’s all about our Little Free Library, which is environment/ocean themed, and which sits just outside our home for use by the local community. Here’s the link for you to have a read.