I used to mourn the dark evenings coming in. I’d spend much of late summer looking for signs of the stirrings of the winter. The dark age spots that would mottle the green of the big beautiful broad sycamore leaves, the slight chill in the air, the swallows gathering on electricity wires overhead. All these subtle signs meant the summer was ending and the winter was nearing.
But that was before I fell in love with winter for the magic of its darkness, its big full moons and incredible sunrises and sunsets. The day might be shorter but nature can put on a show in the hours between the darkness coming and going.
On winter evenings I head for high ground. The light lasts longer on Drung Hill because there’s more sky. That’s what I tell the boys. Some evenings we’ll go there to walk or they might run and we’ll be able be make out the shapes in the darkness but even when it feels like night has fallen your eyes adjust and there’s enough light in the big open sky to walk.
Or there are times when I long to spend the day’s end at the ocean. Winter is when the deep magic of the ocean stirs. The energy is rising. From somewhere in the belly of the Atlantic a force awakens and it is ready to be unleashed upon the land.
For all my love of swimming, there are many days in winter when I stand at the ocean’s edge and turn my head. I’m not welcome this day. The ocean has offered me so much in terms of solace and space and comfort that I do not go against my instinct of not swimming.
The conversations I have with the ocean are open and honest. I greet her like a friend and offer her my gratitude for her presence in my life. I make a sign of the cross before I swim – this is a place we must take all the precautions we can – and offer my thanks when I walk ashore again.
I am always grateful to see the first opening of blue as I drive my car over Cnoc an Uininn to Culdaff or out through Carndonagh into Ballyliffin. I have my rituals and for some reason Ballyliffin calls to me in the winter. It’s the sheer size of the tides that draw me in. Oftentimes I’m the only person on the beach and I can only look on in awe as the giant rollers lash the beach. There’s a wildness at this time of year that make it feel extreme. Walking head first into the wind, it can be hard to lift your head but at the end of the beach there’s the remains of a castle called Carrickabraghy, once the seat of a chieftain family. It’s worth the effort.
There’s a blowhole at the far side of the castle and on days when the waves are powerful, water will be sprayed for tens of feet into the air from the rocks below. The boys used to love coming here when they were small.
This is a place to set your thoughts free, to let the wind and the ocean take them away. If something is bothering me I will come here to walk and somehow the knot of anxiety or worry seems to loosen in the face of the wildness of the elements.
Sometimes I wonder if my life wouldn’t have been easier had we stayed in Dublin. I’ve had to make my work – it wouldn’t exist otherwise. I miss a PAYE job, having colleagues, the certainty. There is so much precarity in the life of a freelance journalist and writer living on a peninsula in north Donegal.
But of all of the things in my life that I love, it’s the fact that the wildness I have come to embrace is all around me. The natural world has opened itself like a flower and I’ve spent so much of my time being immersed in it, learning about it and falling more deeply in love with it.
The seasons change but as they do, the beauty of each unfolds. There’s so much to be found in all of them as long as I don’t allow life get so busy that I can’t get out and enjoy them. That is the challenge for everyone in this busy, striving world.
Do you ever wonder what it would be like?
How different it might have been?
Do these thoughts jolt you awake or do you see them as clouds passing over?
I ask myself were we mad sometimes? Was it all too big?
And then there comes a morning, a bright, crisp, cold one when the light is so pure you’re called to run into the sea
This is the why, I think, as the cold hits me
This is the reason for so much
This time, this place, our children; the whole world right here.