The day of the demo happened to be the 1st February which is Imbolc a celtic celebration, and also St Brigid's Day, the pagan festival was appropriated by the saint day as christianity took root in Ireland. I like St Brigid, she was canny, but leaving her aside I'll go back to Imbolc which celebrates the slow warming of the earth, the unseen seeds developing in the dark. A friend on facebook (yes I  am a bit hooked) asked a question about what seeds her friends had planted and I figure that this year my seeds are hope, determination, some resilience and love-in-a-mist which I scatter liberally all over my garden every year even though it self seeds, I can never have too much love-in-a-mist. I feel too, with the peculiar and currently disturbing political climate that the mexican proverb "they thought they buried us, they didn't know we were seeds" fits well with how I feel about this year and what may come of it. I will admit to deep anxiety. But I'm a nobody, all I can do is get on with my day to day. 

The day of Imbolc was wet, wet, wet where I live but the following day was beautiful and the thought of seeds pushing down and deep, and up and out of the earth made me wonder what is flowering in my garden at the moment. One of the things I did a lot when I first started blogging was to record the flowers in my garden. It was bit of blogging I really loved because it brought me back to my senses, took me out of my head and into my heart. So although it's february and the weather is typically cold I thought I'd take a look. I'd forgotten what a joy it is to really look at my garden, for the past few months I have mainly just hung out the washing, put my vegetable peelings on the compost heap and brought in wood, garden function, rather than garden joy, but it turns out there is quite a lot flowering and signs of spring are there. I'll list my flowers and then post up some photos. So in my garden the last flowers of winter are still in bloom, jasmine nudiflorum, hebe, viburnum, winter heliotrope, winter/spring flowers sarcococca confusa, snowdrops, aconites, wild cyclamen, primulas are doing their thing and there are hellebores in bud and even one violet and a dandelion. For me february always feels tough, I'm longing, like many others, for the touch of sunshine on my skin, the flowers that brave the still cold winter nights give me courage, inspire hope, and warm my heart and the blood in my body as I move from hibernation to open up and reach out to life. 

In my last post I wrote a little about my reasons for blogging and how I was unsure where it was going, what I hoped to gain from it. I can write about politics, it's sometimes a place to vent, to offer my opinion, my opinion isn't worth too much but when I look back, as I do occasionally, I can see that what I'm doing is creating a historical document for myself that allows me to look back at my responses to significant political events. So Trump is in power, Theresa May went to see him. I felt ashamed of her. I don't see her as my prime minister but still I felt misrepresented when I saw pictures of her holding Trump's hand and simpering girlishly next to him at the shared press conference. It shocked me that she could meet a fascist leader on Holocaust Memorial Day. It shocked me that she has just sold millions of pounds worth of arms to Turkey. It makes curl inwards with shame and then that shame which is my country's shame makes me want to fight for my country, makes me want to reclaim my space, to speak out, to say no. It was to this end that I went on a local demo a couple of days ago. It felt important to resist in a more concrete way than ranting or reposting on facebook.