I spent my day off knitting. Properly knitting. The sort of knitting where the kettle only gets boiled when you realise it’s gone cold again, and daylight quietly slips across the room without asking permission. And it struck me that this would be the perfect place to reflect on how our hobbies can become gateways into that elusive and deeply nourishing flow state - that place where we are fully, gently, gloriously present.

Today we start with a question. It’s something I have pondered for years, without ever quite arriving at an answer. Memory, of course, is a great gift,  we simply could not exist without it. But nostalgia is something else entirely.

I have spent much of my life attentive to the inner life and as part of this have studied many different spiritualities in order to discern. That is, to notice where spiritual paths merge, where they diverge, and where something that looks like light may, in fact, be driven by fear.

There is a particular kind of hush that settles at midnight on Christmas Eve. The world feels thinner then, as though it is holding its breath. And when the white candle is lit, the Christ candle, something stirs deep within us. A tingle, perhaps a quiet joy and even a sense that we are standing on holy ground. This is the heart of Christmas: Immanuel - God with us. God is not far away, and certainly not watching from a safe distance; instead God chooses closeness by stepping fully into the mess and beauty of human life. At midnight we proclaim something astonishing: that the Holy One, rather than hovering above the world, enters into it. That the Light is not afraid of the dark and that God is born into our lives. And yet, if we are honest, there is a danger hidden even within this beautiful celebration; once the candles are extinguished, the decorations packed away and ordinary life resumes. We can so easily slip, almost unconsciously, into believing that Christmas was a moment rather than a truth. That God was with us then, but now we must manage on our own again.

The winter solstice arrives quietly. There is no sudden blaze of light, no dramatic reversal of fortune. The longest night does not end with a trumpet call or a visible shift in the sky. And yet  something has turned. The direction has changed and the light has begun its slow, faithful return.

At this time of year, it can feel as though Christmas is everywhere and nowhere all at once.The lights are up. The shops are full. The calendar fills quickly. Yet so often the story at the heart of Christmas — the one about light entering darkness, hope arriving quietly, love choosing vulnerability — feels strangely absent from the public square.

Lately, many of us are sensing the world differently. The land feels more alive, the night more spacious and the wind more articulate. Even time itself seems to have slowed just enough for us to notice that we are not standing alone in the present moment, but at the meeting place of many moments at once.

There is a particular quality to the darkness at this time of year.It is not the darkness of despair, nor the empty dark of absence.It is the deep, gestational darkness - the kind a seed knows when it lies held in the earth, or a child knows in the quiet mystery of the womb.

At this time of year, when I hear the word Sabbath, my mind doesn’t go to rules or obligations. It goes to warmth.

A Christo-Celtic reflection

There is a certain kind of spiritual amnesia that settled over the Western world after the Enlightenment. Of course it ushered in astonishing scientific gifts, yes; but somewhere in the exchange we misplaced an entire dimension of reality.

As the days shorten and the old Celtic year slips into its darker half, something ancient stirs in the bones of this land. The Celts understood this season as a time of return — a return to the hearth, to story, to stillness and to soul.