Tag: New Year

This liminal space…

angela findlay8 Comments

It will be different for everybody. But I love the quietness of these in-between days… 

That bloated weariness from endless festivities and good will. The jaded sparkle of unwrapped gifts spilling out of recycling bins. The jingle of carols fading as the challenges of Christmas are banished into as distant a future as any one year allows. 

For me there’s a sense of peace. A release from the storm of traditions. A disorientation. A heart full of gratitude.

With New Year still to celebrate, there’s just one last real or symbolic cork to pop. Then it’s back to reality with its resolutions, rhythms and routines. Bleak mid-winter stretched unruffled, a blanket of dark fields tucked into the horizon over a sleeping, muddy countryside.

Trees stand brittle, skeletal. We know Spring will come, but in the immediate months ahead it is easy to lose faith that colour, light and warmth will ever return. 

Looking closely, however (with a slightly alarming nod to climate change), small promises have already started to decorate bare branches like fairy lights. A little pink blossom here, a tiny green bud there.

But it is out of sight, below the earth’s surface, where the real hope and action thrive. 

My recent move from storage to studio has uncovered numerous sketches and paintings I haven’t looked at for over twenty years. They were painted in the nineties when I lived on the west coast of Ireland consciously engaging with the four seasons and their corresponding echo within the inner rhythms of a human lifespan. Inspired by Celtic mythology and various spiritual traditions, my thirty-something-year-old self saw winter as Mother Earth’s pregnant womb, and Spring the birth and dance of youth. 

On a soul level, we experience winter in those times when it appears nothing is happening. When everything seems dead, stuck, over. It can feel eternal and deeply uncomfortable. We might search for escape in company, drink, exercise, work… or chocolate and movies. Might make wrong decisions through impatience to crank up the old and move forward. Then one tiny shoot of new growth breaks through the surface and into our lives. The season changes and Winter’s purpose is revealed as saps start to rise unstoppably. Energy returns after its slump… or slumber. Because of its slump or slumber. New creativity flows. Our soul’s spring has arrived.

In the meantime, this darkness can nourish us. It invites stillness and rest. Quiet intimacy. Soul. Life is tiring… winter offers us a chance to withdraw and replenish our energies. So I welcome these dark mornings, short days and early nights – ideally interrupted by crisp sunshine to brighten the spirits – as a period of germination. An opportunity to lay off the guilt of achieving less as we enrich more. A time of holding rather than pushing.

With all that in mind, I wish you a gentle, inspiring, meaningful and happy path into your New Year.

(All the paintings above are a mixture of acrylic and/or pastel and roughly 75x55cm)

Looking back and looking forward…

angela findlay2 Comments

Looking back over the past year, it seems that whatever lens you look through – global, political, environmental, financial, social – it was a pretty shit year. And looking ahead to 2023, it is hard to see how matters can improve enough to turn things around. Collectively we have been hurtling down a cul-de-sac with a gung-ho ‘it’ll be fine’ attitude for far too long and now we are finally waking up to the reality of the wall at the end. 

I was convinced the upside of the covid pandemic would be that the errors of our ways would become so obvious it would be impossible to return to ‘normality’. If they did, it was a short-lived awakening that hasn’t translated into political policy-making. Then again, maybe we are in more of a transition phase than we know. Maybe the upheavals and misery we are witnessing in the widespread strikes, the fuel and food crises, in Iran and so many other places are all part of a necessary disintegration of the old. Like the breaking up of soil for new shoots to emerge and bear different fruits.

Talking with people, it is evident that our outlooks on life and values have been subtly, if not dramatically impacted by the disruption across the planet. Change takes time and attracts resistance. Those who cling to the status quo will have a harder or more frustrating time in the long term, because ultimately the old models were built on dodgy foundations of exploitation and waste of natural and human resources; on greed and a psychological fear of lack; on delusions of superiority or entitlement; on widespread lies, incompetency, unresolved trauma and an epidemic of (often anonymous) nastiness… 

When, however, you turn away from the incessant rumble of worrying news, hardship and suffering that infiltrate our lives and look at the tiny pockets of society we as individuals inhabit, there is still a huge amount of kindness, generosity of spirit, vision, action, personal awakening and growth. So maybe we are all being invited to think differently? My strategy for 2023 is therefore to at least try to see the unrest everywhere as an essential part of a positive and necessary process of change in the world for the good of humanity. An osteopathic realignment of our shared spine. We have a long way to go. There will be casualties and loss. But I do believe in the power of little steps.

I think that is the biggest lesson writing my book has taught me. Getting to publication in July was a long, long climb, a bumpy road, at times a dark and lonely tunnel, at others a heart-expanding series of intimate encounters. Always focusing on the next step rather than the far-off goal, and taking that step were what eventually got me to the other side. 2023 offers a new chapter, a different landscape with expansive new horizons and possibilities. I wish that sense of possibility and hope for change for you and everyone in some small or big way. 

Have a happy, healthy, peace-filled and kind 2023! 

Links relating to the past year:

Read about my book, In My Grandfather’s Shadow, here

Listen to radio interviews and podcasts about it here

View paintings in my Studio Sale here

Read more blogs here