The perfect pink of it all

Sunrise and the wild wolf moon

I have been walking less in this time of darkness, while the days are short and I arrive at work in the dark, watch the world turn blue then black from my window. But this week a change has come - enough light, just, to chance a walk by the canal before the day begins.

It always takes everything to drag myself out, and I do it grudgingly, telling myself I’ll just be ten minutes. This is a low energy time for me, but beside the water it is still the same as it was when I left it, before the dark came down, before Christmas hibernation.

I follow the rutted path, hugging my elbows against the cold. Then, overhead, two cormorants. Black shapes stretched long against the sky. The moon is full across the canal; January moon, Wolf moon. So called because wolves were hungry at this time of year, less food to be had, and so they howled more. Howled at the moon. The water is still, viscous, and the lights are on behind the stained glass panels of a green canal boat and the branches are bare, twisting against a sky that drifts imperceptibly towards day time.

I am stilled by a heron, low, pale, the jut of its beak a ragged right angle, the still span of its wings making its glide ghostly. I turn off the path, through long grass that turns my boots dark, to the edge of the lake. The sky is highlighter pink. Striped, frilled where the clouds puncture it. The sun is a disco ball dropping colour into the water. Pink, which I avoided for so long because it has been so throughly gendered, but which really, when you look at it lighting up a sky, is simply a colour, beautiful in its own right, like any other. Three geese and a moorhen float away from me as I approach, toes on the edge, to look out at the water and the sky and the pink, the perfect pink of it all.

Today, I did something I have been meaning to for a while - I turned on the possibility of paying to subscribe to this publication. I haven’t paywalled anything yet, so everything is still free to read - because more than anything, I want people to read my words and find solace in this quiet space I am carving out. And yet, it takes time to bring you these letters. Art is valuable and so are stories, yet frequently we expect these creative offerings to be free. So for now I am offering it as a choice - if you would like to support me, to encourage the wild and the quiet, it would mean the absolute world. You can do so below. Thank you!