The Rover's Almanac: January
Winter jasmine, Imbolc and streams splitting fissures through Pennine rock
Introduction
At the beginning of each month I like to locate myself, metaphorically, within what is happening around me: the annual cycles, the celebrations and festivals of the calendar, the arc of the stars, the waxing and waning of the moon and the passage of nature whispered on the wind.
This is the second instalment of a regular monthly almanac I write to share with you. It is, in the main, a figurative contemplation, seasoned with some of the more prosaic anchor points and markers that I personally cherish.
Inspiration comes from many sources and I have listed some of these below.
Here we look ahead to the month of January in the year 2024.
Calendar
Monday 1 January - New Year’s Day / Eleventh day of Yule / Mercury Retrograde Ends
Friday 5 January - Twelfth Night
Saturday 6 January - Epiphany
Monday 8 January - Plough Monday
Friday 19 January - Aquarius season
Thursday 25 January - Burns Night
Sky Calendar
Wednesday 3 January - Perihelion: Sun comes as close to the Earth as it will all year
Thursday 4 January - Moon: Last Quarter (3.30am)
Friday 5 January - Close encounter between crescent Moon and Virgo star Spica just after sunset
Monday 8 January - Crescent Moon and red Scorpio star Antares come close after sunset
Thursday 11 January - New Moon (11.57am)
Friday 12 January - Best morning to see Mercury (6.46am)
Sunday 14 January - After sunset, watch Saturn hover above the waxing crescent Moon.
Thursday 18 January - Moon: First Quarter (3.53am)
Wednesday 24 January - Pollux the red star giant in close proximity to waxing Moon
Thursday 25 January - Full Moon (5.54pm) Wolf Moon or Stay At Home Moon
The Rover’s Almanac: January 2024
There’s a lot of talk of new beginnings and the return of the light at this time of year.
’Tis true we are well past the winter solstice and have come through the longest darkest hours.
Once more we move steadily toward the light.
Beneath our feet the first bulb shoots are starting to push up through soil in search of fresh air. We might see winter jasmine and crocuses flowering early in the year. The season is turning.
On the farms it’s time for general maintenance: repairs, painting, cleaning and ensuring that machinery works as it should.
The days are beginning to lengthen. At the end of this month our experience of winter will give way to an urge to move forward into springtime. A metamorphosis will take place, stimulated by an old Celtic remembering in our bones, going by the name of Imbolc.
But wait, we’re not there yet; hold your horses.
There’s a dark torrential river of time to cross before we reach the sanctuary of the other side of winter. The water is in spate, a high force threatening to burst its banks and black out the floodplains.
The universe plays a little joke on 3rd January, Perihelion, sending the sun as close to the Earth as it will be all year, but we feel no heat and see precious little sunlight, the cold darkness endures.
When the ancestors visit our night-shadowed dreams, our kindred-clan-folk dance around fires, drumming, in wild raucous ceremony until the sun moves once more.
When longer days did indeed return, and magpies began to gather sticks, hope blossomed in the collective bosom of the tribe.
They were reassured that this too shall pass, eventually.
Maybe you’re still immersed in it, clinging to a windswept couloir on the bleak mountainside of your waning optimism.
Maybe there is a well of sadness deep inside you that feels like nothing less than a pitch-black shivering subterranean lake.
Maybe there are tears rupturing your composure, forcing their way up like underground streams splitting fissures through Pennine rock.
Perhaps not. Maybe you’re just fine.
There’s still a lot of darkness and deep hibernation to get through. It’s not all warm cocoa, hot water bottles, flickering candles and comfy slippers.
The real deal lies in the yawning silence that opens up when you least expect it, the tears that come while waiting in the supermarket queue, the endless rain and shivering cold, inside and out, the give-up of the hanging head.
How are you bearing up now that the festive cheer has been put back in the cupboard-under-the-stairs for another year? Maybe you’re keeping the lights and decorations up, holding on to the tree a little longer, letting it all outstay its welcome in an attempt to keep back the tide of winter and dispel a dreary heart.
The wintertide snow will find us, sure enough; snow knows.
The darkness is older than we are. It belongs here in a way we never will. It isn't rest, or respite - Stephen Jenkinson
On 8th January, Plough Monday, traditional farm hands returned to their harrowing work after Christmas. Rather than ploughing through yourself, why not sit down for a while and take a look around you, reflect on how you ended up here. You’ve been here before, a number of times. How might you navigate the blackout this time?
The sadness and pain, the despair, the premature yearning for spring and summer sunshine, the desperate casting around for distraction and numbing. This is the hibernation, not so cosy after all.
High withering winds rise and up and wake us from fretful sleep, to rake and claw, questioning our ability to see it through, stripping back.
Our ancestors came through, year after year along the wretched exposed coastline of Norfolk, sunk to their ankles in the muddy ooze of the Lincolnshire Wolds, soaked to the skin on the wet lands of the North Yorkshire Moors and chilled to the bone by the wild wind and snow on the North Pennines.
We are living testament to their substance, endurance and grit.
This resilience and versatility is perhaps something we learned from nature, when we were still a living part of it, not somehow removed, superior and separate.
In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s imagination boggles at the arctic origin of the alpine flora of the Scottish mountains, which have outlived the Glacial period:
I can imagine the antiquity of rock, but the antiquity of a living flower—that is harder. It means that these toughs of the mountain top, with their angelic inflorescence and the devil in their roots, have had the cunning and the effrontery to cheat, not only a winter, but an Ice Age.
Could you endure in such a way? Can you do so now, metaphorically, by letting in the suffering and darkness of so many of your long-gone kith and kin.
Many struggle even to contemplate the darkness at all. Instead, positivity, mind-over-matter, forward-projections, hope and yearning come to the fore.
But have mercy, we all of us need something to hold onto as we stare into the abyss of the long black night.
The rituals of Christmastime and Yule illuminate the path. In the van, during the 12 days of Yuletide, we light a candle each day at dusk, a symbolic gesture to orientate us toward the light.
In the old Northumbrian lead-smelting valley of Allendale Town, where we crossed the New Year threshold, 45 craggy men from the Allen Valleys hoisted the symbolic eternal flame onto their heads and shoulders, setting light to whiskey barrels filled with tar, as part of a festival called Tar Bar’l.
On behalf of crowds of spectators lining the dark roads and urging them on, this band of men carried their burning burdens to the centre of the settlement, where they were used to ignite a ceremonial bonfire.
Fuel to the soul’s fire they may be, but fire rituals, hope and spectating won’t get you through the darkness. No sir.
What will get you through is the ability to stop and endure it from within. This acceptance of having their souls carved out, I suspect, is what got our people through the aeons: an intimacy with pain, a relationship with death.
Stand outside on 25th January and look for the full moon in the black boreal sky. This, the Wolf Moon, is named after the howling of the hungry pack lamenting the scarcity of food in midwinter.
Close your eyes and listen for this long-lost lament. Linger, out in the cold, a little longer. Hurt and howl.
Then feel the stir of the devil in your roots.
Sources
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
The Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to 2024 by Lia Leendertz
Sacred Earth Celebrations by Glennie Kindred
Folklore Myths and Legends of Britain published by Readers Digest
Sky Guide (App)
BBC Countryfile