February, mid-month, here in Ireland. The days can’t make up their mind, frost and freezing fog, bright blue skies and sunlight pouring high and golden. There are new lambs in the fields and shoots coming through the stirring soil.
It’s Ash Wednesday, the start of lent. It is not a practice I observe but seemingly it is the only relic of Catholicism my mother continues. A yearly practice in self-control, habit breaking, a yearly unburdening. Do you practice Lent? What would you leave behind you as we move deeper into Spring?
It’s also Valentine’s Day. You can read my write up of all the folklore of this day here, alongside a couple of lover poems. And below, as promised in my Gorse piece, is this month’s Writing Down the Weeds. Five tiny little ditties on kissing. Five pieces of flash fiction, five scenes, five kisses.
Two are romantic, I think they’re possibly both my weather watcher and her fisherman love (there are yet more links within that link for their story here), but you can let me know if they seem like they are to you too. These two seem to come through again and again in this space, I imagine living where I can see the sea from my windows will only strengthen their relentless tap-tapping at my mind, and I’m not sure what to do with the pair of them. Two more below are barely fiction, both raw and aching, they are two of the most important kisses of my life, a first and a last. And one is a kiss gone all wrong. They are not in this order. I will leave them in the order they came to me in. As always, the practice of writing is full of surprises. And this is what I love about these moonlit prompts for this space; I never know what is going to find its way onto the page and I don’t have the time to second-guess and pull at it… If you write at all I recommend picking up a copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, the book which changed my creative life many years ago and which inspired this, now more than year long, series. Thank you, as always for being here, for your support as I tend my craft, it means more than I can say.
I hope all the days of your year are full of love and kisses, in any good way they may come to you. Xx
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