Learning how to Winter

+ reflections on being halfway through The Artist's Way, pumpkin soup and creme brûlée doughnuts.

I made pumpkin and apple soup for the first time last week (with homemade cheesy, herby croutons), using a pumpkin I painted—not carved—as part of my efforts to beat the seasonal sads. It’s bright orange skin, one of my favourite colours, was dotted with little pink hearts while I shared obscene quantities of chocolate with new friends. It felt like embracing my own version of autumn—cosy, creative, and community-centred—far removed from the spooky, cold kind that has always arrived with expectant dread.

I’m becoming a bit of a cook (note to family: believe it or not!) I’m batch making because I enjoy it, not because I have to due to my incessant schedule. I’ve made a loaf of banana bread four or maybe five weeks in a row now. I’m scheduling my meals with their recipes into my calendar because I do, still, control the controllable (hello neurodiversity). I blame this genuinely drastic shift in my attitude to the kitchen on two books. The Artist’s Way and Wintering.

I’m currently in the middle of week six of The Artist’s Way, third time lucky, and this time hosting a book club weekly for about ten others who are doing it with me. It’s one of the real highlights of my week. The power of accountability and a desire to embody good leadership has kept me on the straight and narrow and I have very diligently read every chapter, underlined and annotated, made time for my morning pages, my artist dates, and the tasks.

There’s a lot to be said about being ‘ready’ for things. When I’m ‘ready’, physically and emotionally, to head out on a long run it’s totally doable, I’m unfazed. When I’m not, when I’m in the wrong kit or I’ve just eaten, or not eaten enough, I’m approximately 137x more likely to finish short of my goal distance, or to put it off entirely. Yet, unlike running which is a luxurious choice, we often must do things when we are not ‘ready’, and in fact, when we do we sometimes find that we were ‘ready enough’. So it has been with the Artist’s Way (round three). I was ready enough. And my soul has responded so well. Progress over perfection.

Baking as a frivolous act of self care and creativity. Reading next to a fire on YouTube making crackling noises. Making pumpkin soup and eating squirrel food (trail mix) because I’m leaning into the seasonal shift.

At the end of September, in fact in the last few days of that month, my body made it very clear to me that my season of scrambling had ended. I had things to take care of. I had me to take care of. My boss cancelled my work travel and all my meetings for a week, suggested I read ‘Wintering’ by Katherine May, I baked a loaf of banana bread, and signed up to a library. I ate waffle fish from China Town on a Tuesday around lunchtime, and I unpacked months of twisted up thoughts and discussions from my work, unravelling them into coherent documents and solutions, slowly, with lots of ginger tea. I didn’t work past 5 or 6pm, after months of work creeping well past 10pm, and had time to refuel with my ‘other’ work (which feels like play), shooting my first YouTube video with Love and London (a tourist blog for Americans) and being wholly present in artist studios around the city as an obsessed and enthusiastic coach.

The Artist’s Way has broken through there too, leaving a studio on the 18th of October after a real humdinger-whip-smacker of a session, a voice in my head said smugly “seeee, those who can’t do, teach” and I snapped back, “no, I teach because I CAN do. that’s what makes me good at this.” I said. I am an artist. I. am. an artist.

I’ve had the famous moments of synchronicity in the last six weeks, in abundance actually. Coincidence, serendipity, the universe, God listening, paying closer attention - whatever you want to call it. I named that I desperately wanted time with dogs, and my colleague brought her two whippets to our meeting the next day, and my boyfriend’s parents brought their dog into the city three days later, both unplanned. I sobbed over a whole thing about dancing - don’t ask, one for the therapist - and the next day met, and spent an afternoon with, a dancer and performer who dances boldly and with every inch of her being to boost her mood and others. I found the clarity, through daily reflection and creating space, to know what small things would make a big impact. A new matcha whisk, some piano sheet music, aforementioned library card. I’ve made things happen. I’ve let things happen.

(note inserted at the end: Now I don’t attribute everything in the following list to my reading The Artist’s Way, many things might have or would have happened anyway, but the way in which I showed up to them? Well, in small or large doses The Artist’s Way and all that comes with it, has certainly shaped my engagement and enjoyment.)

I showed up to a life drawing class for the first time in years. And I didn’t cry once. I created a Soho art trail with gowithyamo and hosted a drawing workshop at Frith Street Gallery which the right people found their way to.

I got paid to eat doughnuts and taken to Frieze London. (Need I say anymore?) I organised a charity run (against SO many odds, another one for my therapist). I began working with two new coaching clients, and I turned up to the studio of a friend who painted me, while we spoke of the resilience of the female body and she shared some extraordinarily exciting creative visions, on a monstrous canvas headed to Miami. I’ve been fed cakes and matcha and Indian desserts. I survived a week of media deprivation, and came out better because of it. (shock). I’ve consciously upped my steps, and lowered my screen time, at a time of year when I was previously content to let them drift the other way. I spent time with people older, younger, funnier, wiser, kinder than me.

I hosted a pumpkin painting workshop (that’s where the pumpkin came from) with Candid Studios, and there’s a Christmas one in the works too because creating space to take care of our oft neglected creative health is increasingly important. Those who came agreed. They didn’t know how much they needed it.

I marked the switching on of the Central London Christmas lights in my calendar - determined to join in the frivolous excitement. And last night I gathered, collectively, with strangers. Just humans being humans, listening to Coldplay blaring from speakers as LED lights flickered gently on. The world can be bleak. The world is bleak. But in that moment, I asked a couple struggling to take selfies whilst dancing with their baby if I could take their photo, and they were delighted to have this moment captured in 0.5 mode. There are moments like this everywhere— caught on camera or sinking into memory. Don’t let them go unnoticed.

I ran with my dad a few days ago, an anxious, angry, frustration-fuelled run on the morning of Trump’s reelection, in damp, thick, cold November air. We ran hard, panting and venting and then we found a rhythm, steady, reflecting, wisely (him), thoughtfully (me). We leant into it. That’s Wintering. I’m understanding what it is to Winter. Not learning, because I know I learnt a very long time ago, through some dark and long winters of my childhood and adolescence. I Wintered then in every sense, as I have since and as I will again, and now I have better language to articulate it.

Onwards into the winter. I’m right here with ya.

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Recommendations without explanation.

Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery (my little tour of the show is here)

This YouTube channel all about artists in their 80’s and 90’s who work in NYC studios.

Wintering by Katherine May. Obviously.

The Bread Ahead creme brûlée doughnut - worth the hype.

Me and a friend on the Francis Bacon show.