And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Dec 11, 2022

for some reason I like to head to a graveyard when it snows.

Ok I’m ready. Pass the blankets, chocolates and books. The temperature has dropped another couple of degrees and I’m just about ready for hibernation now. I’ve deleted my social media apps for a few weeks to try and regain some of my sanity and ability to concentrate on reading a book. I also have my very own poetry book due out on 4th February that is currently far from finished. (More on this soon, but you can check the details out here if you wish!)

Unfortunately the world does not match my desire to put the brakes on and there’s approximately 7 billion jobs to do yet. Nothing in me wants to shop for Christmas shit. If I know you, you are either getting a voucher or a book for Christmas- that’s my shopping limit. My eldest daughter on the other hand lives for busy Christmas markets and events and cheesy music. I don’t know where she gets it from but I’m glad she is there to pull the rest of us through the season.

Despite hating shopping, I admit to being a bit of a Christmas geek. I love my tree, I love awful Christmas films and I love the advent calendar that I made the kids when I was floored with morning sickness for months. I was completely crazy when my eldest was born. Pretty young and overwhelmed with a tiny baby, I filled the calendar full of pinterest-driven activities in a bid to prove to myself that I was indeed an ok Mum. But as the kids have gotten older, I’m glad of it. I don’t do all the make-a-santa-hat-out-of-toilet-rolls and cover everything in glitter type crafts any more, but there are things that have stuck over the years and I’m grateful to have carved out some of our own traditions that spread across the month. It takes the pressure off Christmas Day a little.

I have to admit, I’m not massively looking forward to the actual day this year. It will be the first one without my Grandad being part of it (he’s still here, but living in a home and the current state of his dementia doesn’t really lend itself to us visiting with the kids on Christmas Day). My Dad no longer remembers it’s Christmas so my big sister plays a blinder and buys the kids a present from him. There’s still plenty of family fun to be had, but I’m ready to shake our day up a bit and try something new so it’s not all about the things that are missing or that make us feel a bit sad. Not sure what that looks like yet.

All this is to be expected of course, each of us has things like this in our families to navigate. But in a season based heavily around small traditions and rituals, it’s hard to know what to keep and what no longer serves. For those who celebrate Christmas, it feels like a time of high definition; where the nature of everything passing too quickly, and the changes that have occurred throughout the year are brought under the microscope.

As ever, I digress. I wanted to share this poem with you which sprung to mind when thinking about Winter and that mid-December feeling of having to do all the jobs, whilst your ancient animal body clock screams SLOW DOWN. THE TREES ARE ASLEEP. EVERYTHING IS ASLEEP…

Now I can’t say for certain whether or not Robert Frost had the exhaustion of the modern human, hunting for Christmas spirit amidst a capitalist-consumer nightmare of jangly music and pop-up ads in his mind when he wrote this, but that’s what I’m taking from it. It lulls me into wanting to go to sleep in the woods.

There’s lots written about the meaning behind these words, and I’m not nearly clever enough to unpick it all. All I know is that I think it’s a really hypnotic poem. So seemingly simple and yet for me, incredibly evocative. It needs to be read aloud. You can absolutely picture the scene of someone on his way home and stood in a pure moment of pause. The pull of somewhere dark and deep, but a distance yet to travel. That last stanza is just gorgeous- The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep.

I know some people think Frost is talking about death when he talks about sleep, but that’s not the way I read it, though there is certainly darkness there. For me I feel that pull of tension between hibernation and rest and the things we must do. That’s the beauty of poems though- read them however you like. You will always be likely to read them in a way that matches your experience, no matter what the author intends.

Invitation to write/play…

Write about how the festive season feels for you. Do a cathartic ‘get everything out on the page'‘ type exercise, or try something more measured. Write some gratitudes instead if that floats your boat- I get so caught up in the stresses and moans of the season that I forget to acknowledge how ridiculously lucky I am to have these moans in the first place.
Write about a moment you felt pulled in two different directions. Perhaps a liminal time between where you are now, and somewhere new you are going. How could you make that evident in your writing?
If you fancy having a go at fancy poem structure stuff, this one is really quite clever. 4 equal stanzas, the 1st, 2nd and 4th lines rhyming, with the third line setting the rhyme up for the next verse (apart from the last). Like this:
AABA
BBCB
CCDC
DDDD
It’s tricky to get right without the rhymes sounding contrived, which is one of the reasons the Frost poem is such a bit of genius really.
Do none of the above and just go stomp around in some snow and shake the cobwebs off.

I’ll leave it there this week. Thanks for reading, please do feel free to share your work or thoughts either in the comments or in our new chat space which you can download HERE…

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