Compost | January
a new approach / journaling / cold snap / hermit energy / full moon tarot reading / bird of the month
I’m trying something a little different with my Substack this year. So far, most of my posts have been what I would call short essays, each on a different topic, largely (entirely?) life writing. This year, as I talked about in my last post, I want to focus most of my writing time and energy on my big writing project, so I’m going to try something a little more newsletter-y, a little more early 2000s blog here. I plan to publish two posts a month:
COMPOST (mid-month): a round up of life currently, likely to include short pieces of memoir or nature writing, perhaps also thoughts on things I’m currently reading/watching/listening to. I’m also planning two series for 2025: bird of the month, and a monthly tarot reading
REFLECT (end of the month): process notes on the big writing project, reflections on any interesting thoughts or findings arising from what I’ve been working on that month (for example, this month I’ve mainly been mapping out a structure and transcribing my mum’s rediscovered 2013 blog), my writing goals for the month ahead
In a way, these posts are both versions of the type of journaling I do already. Like
, I always have multiple journals on the go. Currently these include: a 5 year one line a day journal, a free writing journal that’s a mixture of diary and excitable thoughts about my big writing project that occur to me at 11pm, and a notebook to write about my daily tarot card.
I’ve also just started a new journal to keep a record of one thing from each day that made me smile or brought me joy (inspired by a recent post by
):“this year I want to try to write one sentence a day with some detail of something I’m grateful for, or something that’s moved me. I don’t want to call this a gratitude journal, as that will instantly put me off.”
Last year I kept a list of all the birds I saw, which brought me much joy, and birds were also a strong presence in my writing advent (the first half of which I published last month, the second of half of which remains in my draft folder). So: a bird of the month series seemed like a natural extension of this.
Life Writing: 8 January 2025
Wake with my headache from last night still lingering. Strong urge to hibernate under the duvet for the day but there’s packed lunches to be made and children to wake for school. Treacherous icy pavements, the 8 year old barrelling ahead, confident he won’t slip, while I carefully pick my way along.
Clear blue skies and that frosty bite to the air that reminds you you’re alive in this body in this moment. Orange shading to peach shading to yellow shading to palest blue sky. Sun a blazing yellow-white sphere on the horizon, glimpsed through the bare branches of the trees in the park. Smell of frying bacon as I pass the deli, Scar Tissue playing on the radio in the Spar (“with the birds I’ll share this lonely view”). I’m there for essential supplies: bread, milk and throat sweets.
Then home to log on to my work laptop, writing up academic appeal reports and circulating committee minutes. I’m aching to dive into my big writing project - there are so many ideas fizzing inside me and I want to do it all now, now faster. I’m trying to accept and embrace a slower pace. It’s not a race, I have enough time. Slow and steady progress is still progress. If I persevere, in a few months I’ll look back and find that I’ve got thousands of words down on paper that only exist in my head now.
In tarot, you can calcuate a card for the year by adding up the digits of the year. 2025 is a Hermit year (2+0+2+5 = 9, the Hermit is the ninth card of the major arcana)1. It feels like the perfect card for me this year - among other meanings the Hermit represents solitude and seeking, looking to your inner light for guidance, making time and space for yourself. I’ve set myself the mildly terrifying goal of completing a first draft of my big writing project by the end of the year, so these are all things I want to cultivate.
The Hermit is represented by a tortoise within its shell in the Wild Unknown tarot deck (one of my favourite decks). There are layers of visual and cultural symbolism in this card, in the tortoise, the lit oil lamp, the surrounding darkness. It is the energy of this card that I want to bring to my writing this year: slow and steady progress, self-sufficiency (I have all the tools I need), focussing on the journey rather than the destination, confident that I will reach it in time.
Full moon tarot reading
I use tarot as a method of self-reflection, to help me think through a dilemma or a tricky situation, or to dig further into why I’m feeling a certain way about someone or something. It often gives me a fresh perspective or new ideas, something that I might not have considered otherwise. I also regularly pick a tarot card for the day, both as a way of helping me to learn the card’s meanings and as a kind of weather forecast for the day ahead.
The common thread in all of the above is that I generally use tarot for myself. I interpret the cards very specifically based on my personal circumstances and experiences. What I want to try and do here is to offer a more general reading, applicable to everyone, exploring the energies surrounding us at this full moon2.
I mostly stick to simple two or three card spreads. Tarot spreads that use more cards (like the Celtic Cross with 10 cards or the Horseshoe with 7) often feel a little overwhelming, requiring an investment of time and brain power to fully interpret that I generally don’t have the capacity for. I find that a three card spread works well. It enables you to ask a layered question, or to build a layered answer to a simple question.
For example, the three cards can represent past/present/future or mind/body/heart, allowing you to explore a question from different perspectives. The meanings and symbols of each cards can also influence those of the other two - are there any common or opposing themes? how does the meaning of the second card change if you read it is a bridge between the first and third cards?
The middle card above (the Eight of Cups) represents now, the present moment, the full moon in Cancer. The card on the left (the Nine of Wands) look back at the past, specifically the previous two weeks when the moon was waxing. The card on the right (the Hermit) looks ahead to the future, specifically the next two weeks of the waning moon. I asked a broad, open-ended question before I drew these cards: “what do we need to know right now, in this moon cycle?”. In that magical way that tarot often seems to, these cards offer an interpretation - a story - that is exactly what I needed to hear right now. I hope you find something useful in them too.
Now
Very much an ongoing New Year’s vibe! The Eight of Cups is about making difficult decisions and hard choices, but there can be joy in this too. Something needs to change. Nothing changes if nothing changes. It’s time to recognise and accept what isn’t working in our lives and give ourselves permission to let it go. It might be painful to do so, but it also allows us to focus our time and energy on what is working, or to find a new path that might work better for us. I practice a long New Year’s, giving myself until at least the end of January to reflect on the past year and set goals or intentions for the year ahead, so this feels like a good card to draw this month.
Looking back
Christmas was a lot. 2024 as a year was a lot. The Nine of Wands asks us (forces us?) to recognise our tiredness after a festive season that for many of us probably involved a lot of hard work in stage managing the Christmas magic, travel to visit distant family and friends, and navigating some tricky interpersonal relationships with said family and friends. Coupled with ongoing despair and anxiety about the state of the world and the horrors that human beings continue to inflict on their fellow humans. All packed into (if we’re lucky) a two week “holiday” from work. The Nine of Wands says that it’s OK to be exhausted, that it’s important to recognise this exhaustion and take what time we can to rest and recover. Alongside that, it asks us not to give up, to keep going, to persevere. It’s a reminder that the effort we have - and will - put into achieving our goals (both individual and collective) is worth it.
Looking forward
I swear that I didn’t fiddle the deck to draw this card here! As I’ve already touched on earlier in this post, the Hermit is about solitude. It asks us to claim some time and space to be alone in the coming weeks, to try and mute all the external noise and voices, and to think about what we need. Maybe we need to rest more, maybe we’re ready to dive into a new project or to continue one that’s already in progress. Maybe we know we need to learn more or develop our skills in a particular area, and if so the Hermit can prompt us to look for a teacher or mentor. Or maybe it’s nudge to remind us that we can take on this role for others, that we have valuable skills and knowledge that we could share. Ultimately, the Hermit is about the self: self examination, self acceptance, self reliance. There’s a sense of trust - trusting yourself, trusting the journey, trusting that slow and steady progress is still progress.
Bird of the month: Kingfisher
(Alcedo atthis, Glas y Dorlan3)
We saw a kingfisher on Christmas Day. A flash of turquoise flame darting upstream through the midwinter dusk as we walked along the old railway line turned footpath. I felt a sudden rush of the same kind of magic that Christmas used to bring in childhood, when the world feels mysterious and full of possibility and so, so much bigger than I am. I try to find moments of magic for myself each year, but these days Christmas is more about creating that magic for my children, while at the same time trying to complete a 3D logistical jigsaw puzzle alongside the heartache that the season also brings.
The kingfisher though: one of my favourite birds when I was a child, despite never having seen one. Their elusiveness was part of the appeal I think, as well as the jewel-like colours that seemed more suited to a tropical rainforest than a riverbank in Britain. I imagined them to be about the size of a blackbird at least, maybe even a jackdaw, perhaps because in photographs they’re always shown in extreme close up, filling the image. But they are tiny: only a little larger than a robin.
I spent several months when I was 9 or 10 years old lusting after a kingfisher figurine in a shop window I walked past every day on the way home from school. Porcelain or something like it, perched on a branch, an orange breast the same colour as my bedroom walls, and turquoise wings folded. I was obsessed with it. I longed to see a real kingfisher, but this was nearly as good. I would stop every day to study the figurine through the window, meeting its blank black-eyed gaze with my own.
It came to symbolise something I wasn’t able to put into words at that age: the unknown, the future, a yearning for something that you might never have. A sense of magic that might not really exist. I saved up my pocket money for weeks and weeks until I was finally able to buy the kingfisher figurine. Now it sits on a shelf in my childhood bedroom now, still always just out of reach.
You can also calculate a personal tarot card of the year by adding the digits of your birth day, birth month and the year together and identifying the corresponding card(s) in the major arcana. For example, if you were born on 1 January, you would calculate 1+1+2+0+2+5 = 11, giving you either Strength (11) or the High Priestess (1+1 = 2) as your card of the year.
This is probably the most woo sentence I have published publicly to date and I can already feel the vulnerability hangover brewing!
The Welsh name for the kingfisher, its literal translation is ‘blue of the riverbank’.