A Love Letter to January

(Also available to listen to on Spotify)

🌟 NEWS🌟

If you would like to join other Slow Friends (paid subscribers) and me and connect on a deeper level, then this year I’ll be sharing a Walk & Talk video each month from wherever I’m wandering, along with a word for the month and a related journalling prompt to help us all gain some clarity as we journey through 2025.

January’s walk was from here in France, and our word is BALANCE.

“I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this walk and talk and the journaling prompt worked magic on me. Sometimes it can be too easy to get bogged down in details and you can’t see what is going on until something makes you stop. Thank you for focusing my mind” - Fran.

You’d be so very welcome to join us!

With love,

Alice
💙❄️🙏🏻

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Transcript of A Love Letter to January:

January: Your suffocating skies render me motionless. To breathe beneath the endless grey, pillowing and billowing — some days — takes all my strength.

And then…I wake in the night, pad across cold stone floors and moonlight averts my eyes, gleaming like silver through the west-facing window. I catch my heart, hold tight with my hand and once again the breath is caught, but this time with delight, not dread.

Balance, I breathe.

A word so loaded with resignation and expectation — how to find the middle ground?

The heron knows all about balance as he stands in the field, poised and perfect, not even momentarily shaken by our presence. I want to be like the heron, I think, unshakeable, serene in my stability. But, alas, I am not a heron who has but a small number of duties to carry out each day, I am a human, with human thoughts cascading through my mind, always trying to catch me out.

To breathe, to not breathe, to feel sadness, to feel joy; the conundrum of this existence exhausts me at times as somewhere between the weight of January skies and the light of a full moon I do my best to reach a state of equilibrium.

For this is the puzzle of life that each of us is tasked with putting together — that there can be good and bad, sunshine and rain, and we must find how to walk through it all without stumbling.

I walked in the rain several times this month, rain that soaked my jeans so they stuck to me. Rain that dripped from my nose. Rain that made me cry. Rain that made me laugh.

As I explored the lanes of this wintry landscape, dank and devoid of colour but for the orange leaves still hanging on, a dampness in the air that chills a person to the bone, I thought of the trees, of the grass, of the land and how it so graciously yields to the seasons; to change.

For what is there to fear in complete surrender?

Life feels like a whirlwind at times with so many decisions to make, and plans to instigate. Do you ever feel like screaming, “Stop the ride, I want to get off”? And yet it does not seem possible to be a tree or a blade of grass in this modern world because even at a standstill there is food to be bought and bills to be paid. I see your struggle, and mine, and I have no answers, only that the sweet sense of surrendering to truth, to being courageous in the face of transformation, feels like truly living.

An old and once-dear friend once said to me, “Bravery is rewarded” and I hold onto those words tightly as I navigate these suffocating skies, the driving rain, and the endless chill of these dank winter days, knowing that soon enough spring will come. Leaves will unfurl, flowers will shine purple and yellow and new dreams will be realised.

The balance is in seeing — truly seeing — the seasons, and allowing them to permeate our very being. The equilibrium is in breathing into the knowledge of living in truth, no matter how scary or testing, and the ease comes with trusting that we are always exactly where we are meant to be.

Thank you, January, for cracking my heart right open and allowing me the time to quietly process what it is that I found at its centre.