S3 Ep11 FAREWELL WINTER A special episode for the turn of the season

The UK’s #1 favourite Christmas podcast is back for a one-off special to mark the turning of the season and the gift of a leap day as winter gives way to spring. This bonus episode ‘FAREWELL WINTER’ includes:

-       A beautiful ritual for bidding farewell to winter

-       An insight into the tradition of ‘leap day’

-       Ideas for celebrating the arrival of spring

-       A peek into Japanese microseasons

-       Some gorgeous words capturing the feeling of the season turning

-       Our wellbeing and nature corners

-       A peek into my brand new book KOKORO (which is out on April 4)

-       An inspiring writing prompt and more

With inspiration from Mary Webb, Masaoka Shiki, Alan Watts, Lin Yutang, Madoka Mayuzumi, Tadashi Terashima, Yosa Buson and Christina Georgia Rossetti.

Why not take a walk this week, and have a listen while looking out for signs of spring where you are? (And for those of you in the southern hemisphere, may it be an invitation for you to notice signs of autumn).

Beth Xx

Handy links:

·      My new book KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived (Piatkus) (or free international shipping when you order via Blackwells here)

·      Get FREE access to my new seasonal writing sanctuary Spring Light when you pre-order  KOKORO from any retailer (Here’s the link for Blackwells who are offering free international shipping). Once you have ordered it in any format from any retailer, go to bethkempton.com/kokoro and pop your receipt details in the short form there. 

·      My haiku essay: The Life-Changing Magic of Writing Haiku: finding beauty and solace in a heartbeat sized poem 

For all show notes including book and article reference links please click here.

Transcript

Into the scented woods we’ll go,

And see the blackthorn swim in snow.

High above, in the budding leaves,

A brooding dove awakes and grieves;

The glades with mingled music stir,

And wildly laughs the woodpecker.

When blackthorn petals pearl the breeze,

There are the twisted hawthorn trees

Thick-set with buds, as clear and pale

As golden water or green hail – 

As if a storm of rain had stood

Enchanted in the thorny wood, 

And, hearing fairy voices call,

Hung poised, forgetting how to fall.

Welcome to a very special edition of the Calm Christmas Podcast, Farewell Winter, with me, Beth Kempton. That beautiful poem was Green Rain by Mary Webb in A Poem for Every Spring Day edited by Allie Esiri and hails the turn of the season, as winter prepares to depart and spring in hovering at the door. I am here with my hands around a hot mug of tea, watching rain stream down the window pane and listening to the wind batter the chimney. I do love the cosiness of this kind of weather, in deep winter, but lately I have been finding myself sniffing the air for a hint of spring. Today’s episode marks this transition, inviting us to pause for a moment and bid farewell to winter. 

As I am sure you have noticed, this year is a leap year, so we get the gift of an extra day on February 29. This is the first time I have ever done a Farewell Winter episode, because the Calm Christmas Podcast only began back at the end of October 2020, at the end of the pandemic year we’ll never forget, so this is the first opportunity for it. In some ways this bonus episode is also a celebration of the fact that the Calm Christmas Podcast is now officially the UK’s #1 favourite Christmas podcast, which is just staggering and wonderful. Thank you to every single one of you who has shared episodes with your friends, told your followers about it, and tuned in to bring some calm to the chaos and light to the darkness of winter.

It has always felt to me like the calendar should run March to February instead of January to December, so we fully close out winter before beginning a fresh new year in Spring. This gift of an extra day this year feels like an opportunity to do that – to treat the ‘leap day’ as sacred, to take a moment to pause and notice the transition of the seasons, and to be grateful for the arrival of sunshine, blossoms and hope.

In today’s episode we are going to share a beautiful ritual for bidding farewell to winter, hear some gorgeous words related to the transition from one season to another, seek out early signs of spring, and share some ideas for ways to embrace the arrival of the season of possibility. As many of you know, this has been an incredibly difficult year for me in so many ways, as it has been for lots of you, I know. My mother was given a terminal cancer diagnosis last March and died in April, just as the cherry blossom peaked, and I returned home from the hospice to find the pale pink petals scattered on the ground in my garden, a mirror of my own feelings, not knowing how to live in a world without her in it. I spent much of the past year writing a new book, and it saved me, it changed me, it gave me a completely new perspective on life, and brought joy and light back in. I’d like to tell you more about that later on today too, because that book, KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived, will be published this spring, and I have created a beautiful new seasonal writing sanctuary for us to share – it is called Spring Light and anyone who pre-orders Kokoro will be able to join me for free as we explore impermanence and beauty in words. I will share more about that later, or you can find out how to register for free at bethkempton.com/kokoro.

For now, let’s take a moment to think about the extraordinary occurrence of an extra day in our calendars, once every four years.

To be honest I didn’t know much about the origins of February 29 as ‘leap day’, so I did some investigating. Here’s what TIME Magazine had to say about it: 

“It may seem an odd and arbitrary choice but the origins of Feb. 29 are actually steeped in the long history of timekeeping, astronomy, and the evolving attempts to align the two through mathematics.

Intercalation, or the insertion of days in a calendar, has been tried and tested across civilizations, to try to ensure that lunar and solar schedules remain compatible and consistent with the tracking of seasons. The practice varies across cultures: the ancient Egyptian calendar year was composed of twelve 30-day months, with fiveepagomena(days) appended at every year’s end. In lunisolar timekeeping like in the Chinese calendar, an extra month is added every three years, allowing adherents in those years to celebrate two spring months to welcome in the new year or “double spring.” Similarly, in the Vikrami and Hebrew calendars, a month is added once every three years or so, following the moon’s 19-year cycle of phases. Islam’s lunar calendar has a 30-year cycle in which 11 of those years have an extra day added to the month.

But the modern Leap Day as we know it traces its roots back to ancient Rome. Romulus, the first king of Rome, established the Roman Republican calendar around 738 B.C., decreeing that a year began in Martius (now called March), was only 10 months long, and didn’t account for winter because people didn’t work then. But frustrated by irregularities and cognizant of the Roman calendar’s differences with other calendars, by the 7th century B.C., Numa Pompilius, the second Roman king, decided that it was time to start formally counting winter months. Thus Ianuarius (January) and Februarius (February) were added—at the end of the calendar year.

Still, even after adding these two months, the Roman calendar every so often went out of whack with the seasons. So about every two years, Roman consuls would discretionarily add a 27- or 28-day 13th month—Mercedonius, or sometimes called Intercalaris—to shift their measure of time back in sync with the sun. Typically, the extra month would be inserted after Feb. 23, cutting short February by five days to immediately follow the celebration of Terminalia, an annual festival on Feb. 23 that honors the ancient Roman god of boundaries Terminus.

Then came Julius Caesar, who ordered a new solar calendar, created with the help of Greek astronomer Sosigenes, who was an adviser to Egypt’s Cleopatra, whom Caesar was known to consort with. The new Julian calendar—which took effect in 45 B.C. after a corrective 445-day ultimus annus confusionis (“last year of confusion”)—was based on the math that a year should consist of exactly 365 days and 6 hours, and that every four 365-day years those extra six hours would total to one extra day. Caesar’s calendar added this intercalary day after Feb. 23 by extending Feb. 24 to 48 hours. 

… It would seem safe to assume that humanity had perfected the art of tracking time by now, but one more adjustment was made beginning in 1972: leap seconds, which help to make up for an ever-so-slight remaining difference between Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is based on the Gregorian calendar, and atomic time, which more closely approximates solar time and is slightly faster. But timekeeping is not an exact science—and sometimes it causes so many headaches that experts decide to stop pursuing such precision, such as in 2022, when the world’s foremost metrology body decided to abandon leap seconds altogether by 2035.”

Fascinating, hey? So many wonderful ideas in there. Can you imagine a 445 day year and how confusing that would be when it came to birthdays? More time for holidays, I hope. The idea of a leap day is a wonderful one, and I want to invite us to bring our attention to the meaning of the word ‘leap’, not as a bridge between one year and the next as leap day is, but in terms of our own lives. 

Perhaps this could be a day we take a leap of faith and do something we have been dreaming of for a long time, or take a bold step in the direction of our dreams? 

Perhaps it could be a day that we allow fully free leaps of the imagination, to put colour to those dreams, or allow ourselves a new kind of creative freedom, or begin to imagine a life where we no longer carry limiting beliefs, or care what other people think?

What kind of ‘leap’ might you take this leap day, I wonder? Perhaps something to journal about today.

At the very least, why not try to build in some time for reflecting and dreaming on February 29, for making a gratitude list, or doing something special with someone special, in full awareness of this gift of a day. If this past year has taught me anything it is that every single day is a gift, truly – we never know how many we have left, and taking some time to offer gratitude for each one, is a wonderful thing to do. I feel like February 29 is a marker in the calendar reminding us of this. Perhaps we should make it the international day of gratitude.

I have decided to take the day off and do no work on February 29. I have a yoga class booked, and my alarm will be set to have me at my desk, with a candle and my journal, at 5am to write about all the blessings in my life, before taking my tea out to watch the sunrise. When the girls are at school I might go for a long walk with Mr K, or if it is especially sunny and calm we might even get the paddleboards out. Perhaps we’ll take them to the beach after school to run around, eat salty chips with our fingers and watch the sunset together.

Even if you have work or other obligations on leap day, why not take a few minutes for yourself, in gratitude for this extra day, and all the days we have.

I would also like to offer you a simple ritual to consciously mark the end of winter. It is related to one of the crafts I have previously shared on the podcast, and involves making a paper snowflake, writing on it, then burning it. It can be a beautiful quiet ritual, or a fun thing to do with children.

You will need:

·      A candle

·      Scissors 

·      Some square white paper – computer printer paper is fine – in a square shape. If you have a rectangular piece just fold up one corner so two sides match up, then cut down the third side and you’ll have a perfect square.

·      A pen

·      Matches or a lighter

·      A heatproof bowl

Always be careful with fire - safety first please!

1.     First make your snowflake. Take your square piece of paper and fold it corner to corner, then again, and again, so if you were to open it out you would have lots of straight lines emanating from the centre of the square. Take your folded piece of paper and cut random shapes out of each side, taking care not to fully cut alongside a folded edge or your snowflake will fall apart. I like to do intricate swirls but you can do whatever you like. Then open it out and marvel at its beauty.

2.     Light the candle, take a few gentle breaths and think about this past winter. Is there anything you want to let go of or move on from? Write it down. Did anything worry you this past winter? Write it down. Did you suffer in any way this past winter? Write it down. Did anything in the world break your heart this winter? Write it down. 

3.     Then set light to it over the heatproof bowl, and put your hand on your heart and keep breathing as you watch it burn, as if the snowflake is melting and taking all your worries and suffering with it.

4.     If you are doing this with children you might want to do an alternative version, which is simply to write down your hopes and dreams on the snowflake, leave them hanging up by a window overnight and then light them the following day, imagining that as you light the paper you are sending your hopes and dreams up into the sky.

5.     When you have finished, and the snowflake has turned to ash in the bowl, wet one finger, or take a small stick, and use it to make a mark in your journal with the ash. Next to it write what you want to invite in this spring, and what you are hopeful about. 

6.     And then blow out the candle, step out into the day, and perhaps go for a lovely walk to breathe in the early spring air.

Early spring can be a strange time for weather – sunshine, rain, snow even. I got married on April 4 and it remember how it snowed on our wedding day. Everything was white – the old VW Beetle I arrived in, my dress, the snow falling on my furry shawl. 

I took a walk around the garden the other day, thinking about this podcast and you and all the things I wanted to share, and I looked out for signs of spring. There were blue grape hyacinths growing out of a low wall, a daytime moon in the pale blue sky, tiny sprigs of leaves in the rose bushed and the beginnings of buds. The lavender was silvery grey and still musky, the rosemary reminiscent of roast dinners, honeysuckle vines with waxy green leaves promising yellow and white flowers later, daffodils, which have been blooming since December, some pale yellow primroses, a patch of daisies that have escaped the mower, and lime green buds on the hydrangea bush. The cherry plum tree my parents gave me for my birthday a couple of years back offered perfect delicate pink blooms. So much life everywhere, biding its time, almost ready to show itself.

My mum was a primary school teacher so we always had a nature table at home, as well as in the classroom. I start to gather some things. Bright daffodils, and some of those smaller, paler yellow narcissus minnow ones, candles in spring colours, feathers, a yellow cloth. Soon I will take my snips to the fruit trees and bring a few thin branches inside to force blossom in a jug, watching it transform from a dark branch to a cloud of plum, cherry or apple as the months roll on.

If winter was for hibernating and dreaming, spring is for awakening, planting seeds and nourishing those dreams with action. I might adopt the mantra be more daffodil – bright and bold through all weathers of March. Not hiding. Sharing our colours and beauty with the world. This week why not tell someone about a project you are working on. Say it out loud and take another step towards making it real. 

Meteorologically speaking, the official first day of spring is March 1 (and the last is May 31), and these seasons are based on annual temperature cycles rather than on the position of Earth in relation to the Sun. Astronomically speaking though, the first day of spring here in the northern hemisphere is marked by the spring equinox, which falls on March 19, 20, or 21 every year. 

As you might know, I have had a love affair with Japan for quarter of a century, and one of the many things that I have always been drawn to is the attention paid to the seasons in many aspects of Japanese life. As I shared in my book Wabi Sabi, the traditional Japanese calendar – which originated in China - has 24 divisions, known as sekki, and each of those is further divided into three microseasons, known as kō. There are 72 of these microseasons, and they have beautiful names capturing something that happens in nature around that time, such as East Wind Melts the Ice. The names were also originally taken from China, but they did not always match up well with the local climate in Japan, so they were rewritten in 1685 by the court astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai. With climate change these are drifting in modern times, so the natural activities and phenomena don’t necessarily line up with the microseason any more, which is a whole other conversation. But for today I wanted to share a few from this time of year:

Dates are approximate and can vary from year to year, but these poetic microseason names might give you some inspiration for seeking out signs of spring where you are:

 | February 24–28 | 霞始靆 Kasumi hajimete tanabiku | Mist starts to linger
| March 1–5 | 草木萌動 Sōmoku mebae izuru | Grass sprouts, trees bud
|
| March 6–10 | 蟄虫啓戸 Sugomori mushito o hiraku | Hibernating insects surface
| March 11–15 | 桃始笑 Momo hajimete saku | First peach blossoms
| March 16–20 | 菜虫化蝶 Namushi chō to naru | Caterpillars become butterflies

For me, spring is all about blossom. 

In Japan there are late winter cherry blossoms in late February and early March, and then March to May sees a wave of cherry blossom sweep the entire nation. There are regular televised forecasts of blooms showing the ‘sakura zensen’ - the cherry blossom front – so people can plan their travels to witness the flowers bursting into bloom, sit beneath them drinking sake and singing karaoke, or take a quiet moment to watch them fade.

Besides its utter gorgeousness, the cherry blossom tells the oldest story in the world – that of a fleeting beauty which reminds us of the impermanent nature of everything, and the anticipatory grief for the loss of that beauty, which is a mirror of our knowledge, deep down, that we will also one day fall like the blossom drifting on a spring breeze.

There are many ways to celebrate the arrival of spring. Here are a few of mine – perhaps you can come and share some of your favourites with me on Instagram @bethkempton.

·      Have breakfast outside (even if you still have your coat on)

·      Go for a picnic

·      Make a nature table

·      Buy some flowers at the farmer’s market, or from a local honesty box

·      Spend an uninterrupted twenty minutes in the garden or in a park, simply counting birds, or shades of green

·      Paint a room in the house 

·      Pop an invitation in each of my children’s lunchboxes, inviting them on a treasure hunt after school

·      Make a lovely salad with the first spring leaves 

·      Go and listen to a forest. If you don’t have one near you, you can listen to a recording of one. There is a wonderful interactive world map of forest sounds at timberfestival.org.uk/soundsoftheforest-soundmap/

·      Pretend I am a tourist and take a trip around the area I live in as if seeing it for the first time

·      Make a daisy chain

·      Plant some radishes

·      Treat myself to a new house plant

·      Listen to a flower-themed visualisation

·      Hunt for heart rocks at the beach, or for shapes in the clouds

·      Blow bubbles

·      Write a letter to someone I haven’t seen in a while

·      Have a clearout, donating clothes, books and toys and making space in my life

·      Go to the sea, or spend time on it

·      Make a playlist of spring tunes and dance around the kitchen

·      Plant a tree

How about you?

I know that lots of you enjoyed the gentle writing prompt in each of the episodes I offered this year, so let’s think about writing spring.

In English, we have a number of spring-related sayings that tend to come from observations of the natural world. Things like “Don’t say that spring has come until you can put your foot on nine daisies.” And “One swallow does not make a spring.” A favourite quote of mine attributed to Audrey Hepburn is, “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”

In much of the Japanese poetry I love, spring is a common motif, particularly in haiku.

Here are a couple of lovely ones by Masaoka Shiki, which can be found in the gorgeous little book A House by Itself – Selected Haiku: Masaoka Shiki translated by John Brandi and Noriko Kawasaki Martinez

Spring rain

I close my umbrella 

and take a walk

Plum blossoms

one sprig

In my medicine bottle

Still too early

the wisteria on the trellis

holds back its blossoms

An extract from Spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins (who lived at a similar time to Masaoka Shiki) in Ten Poems for Spring (Candlestick Press) p.16

 Nothing is so beautiful as spring –

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush 

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing labs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?  

I also loved these words from the opening of Alan Watts’ book Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal. The poem is called Searching for the hermit in vain by Chia Tao (777-841) translated by Lin Yutang.

I asked the boy beneath the pines.

He said, “The master’s gone alone

Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,

Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.”

One of Japan’s most well known contemporary haiku poets Madoka Mayuzumi edited a beautiful collection of haiku by regular folk from the year of the 2011 great earthquake and tsunami, which happened on an early spring day (March 11). It is called So Happy to See Cherry Blossoms, and in it she wrote,

“Traditionally, “spring dream” is a metaphor for something fragile and fleeting, as in the opening lines of the (fourteenth century) account of the rise and fall of the Taira clan, Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike): “The arrogant do not last for long, / just like a dream on a spring night.” This reflects the Buddhist tenet on the transience of life. As The Heart Sutra says, “The laws of all existence are like a dream, phantom, bubble, a shadow.” And in Buddhism, what is given in the haiku as “real world” is “the present” in the three worlds of existence: the past, present and future.

One of the poems that really struck me was one by 86-year old Tadashi Terashima, whose hometown of Shinchi, in Fukushima, was directly hit by the tsunami, which devastated most of its coastal area. One hundred people died as a result. This is his poem:

Haru no yume sameyo gense no tsunami ato

Awake from spring dream to real world’s tsunami scars

Other seasonal words used in poems in the book include harusamu, “spring cold” which refers to the cold that persists after the Vernal Equinox, oborozuki which means “blurred or blurry moon” which, meteorologically, is explained as a consequence of the approaching low atmospheric pressure. In Japanese poetry blurriness has been regarded as one of the attributes in spring when the world thaws, warms, and grows suffused with softness. I love thinking about that that as a way of being at this moment in the year – us thawing after the winter, and growing with softness. Another favourite from the collection was the seasonal word hinaga which means“day’s long” or “long day”, which comes from the sense that with the arrival of spring the days grow longer and are felt to be so. It has a suggestion of relief and relaxation. 

And finally a couple of lovely haiku from the Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson translated by WS Merwin & Takako Lento.

p.21

Mist in the grass 

the water silent 

just before sunset

p.25

Spring rain 

the day ending 

I linger with it

p.36

Long days deepen 

and the past seems

farther and farther away

So your writing invitation for today is to write a memory of spring, as a short poem. If you want to try a haiku you might like to read my Substack essay ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Writing Haiku: finding beauty and solace in a heartbeat sized poem’. You can find it at bethkempton.substack.com or in the link in the shownotes – it is a free essay that will give you some tips for writing your own as well as a round up of my favourite books on haiku if you want to dive deeper into this gorgeous poetry form. 

Which reminds me that I wanted to invite you to join me for a beautiful new writing class, Spring Light, where we will explore impermanence and beauty, tune into the season and spill what is in our heads and hearts onto paper. This week-long live seasonal writing sanctuary, which includes daily lessons and two live sessions with me, is valued at £59 but you can get access for free if you pre-order my new book KOKORO which will be out on April 4.

It’s simple to do this, just order a copy of Kokoro in any format - hardback, ebook or audiobook – from any retailer before April 4, and then go to bethkempton.com/kokoro and put your receipt details in the form there. Then I will send you a note on publication day with details of how to access the class, which will run online from April 22-27. If you are in the US or Canada, your edition will be published later in the year, but if you want the first edition beautiful hardback with free access to Spring Light, you can order a copy from Blackwells of Oxford which is apparently offering free shipping anywhere in the world right now. You can search Kokoro by Beth Kempton on their site at blackwells.co.uk or find a direct link in the shownotes.

Which brings me to KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived. The word ‘kokoro’ is a beautiful Japanese word which has been alive in the language since before there was a character to write it down. It has no direct equivalent in English – indeed my quest to discover the full expanse of its meaning is a thread running through the book – but in essence it means something along the lines of ‘intelligent heart’.

As many of you know, several years ago I wrote a book called Wabi Sabi: Japanese wisdom for a perfectly imperfect life. In it, I explored the beauty of imperfection and what the concept of wabi sabi could teach us about acceptance and letting go. What I have never told anyone is that on submitting the manuscript, I was left with a sense of something being incomplete, but I was not sure what.

Towards the end of Wabi Sabi I had shared an experience of time slowing to the point I could almost see a new memory being imprinted on my heart. I wrote about it to illustrate a point, without realising that reliving it had loosened the ribbon on an old scroll of questions I had gathered in my twenties and thirties, but had rolled up and put away when I got busy with my career and, later, with family life. Questions about time and meaning, mortality and mystery, and how to navigate life so we have no regrets.

As I hit send on the Wabi Sabi manuscript, got up from my chair and turned to the window of my attic writing room, the forgotten scroll fell from my lap and unravelled, spilling the questions all over the floor. I knelt and gathered them up carefully, knowing that as one story finished, another was just beginning.

That story would take me back to Japan several times over the next five years, as I ran headlong into midlife, with two small children, a growing business, a deepening furrow above my right eyebrow, and fistfuls of questions about life, which seemed to be rushing by faster every day.

It would take me to the very edges of my experience as a human being as I heard a knock on the door, and opened it to find death standing there, waiting to take my mother. It would see me whisper her through the portal between this world and whatever lies beyond, crush me to dust in the wake of her passing, and see me slowly take shape again, with the help of kind strangers, old sages, and three sacred mountains in a remote part of Japan.

That story would become Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived. 

Writing this book changed my life. Reading it may change yours. It is a book of grief and hope, darkness and light. It is a book about navigating major life transitions, and making the most of whatever time we have on earth, however long that may be. 

Together we will journey to the deep north of Japan, hike ancient forests, watch the moon rise over mountains of myth and encounter a host of wise teachers along the way - Noh actors, chefs, taxi drivers, coffee shop owners, poets, philosophers and the spirits that inhabit the land. We will contemplate the true nature of time at one of the world's strictest Zen temples and nothing will be quite the same again.

The wisdom found in the pages of Kokoro has drifted into my open hands like flower petals on a breeze, gathered conversation by conversation on my wanderings through Japan. In writing it down, I am gently blowing those petals in your direction. My intention with this book is to share what Japan and its culture have so generously taught me, in case that can be a doorway for you too. 

In Kokoro, you’ll learn: 

• Why three sacred mountains in a remote snowy part of northen Japan hold the keys to choosing a new path anytime we like 
• What a thirteenth-century Zen Master can teach us about the nature of time and why this changes everything 
• What encountering death can teach us about living well 
• How to tune in to and take care of your kokoro, and let it guide you daily as you cultivate a life well lived.

To explore the kokoro is to explore the very essence of what it means to be human in this tough yet devastatingly beautiful world. When you learn to live guided by the light in your kokoro, everything changes, and anything is possible.

As I mentioned, if you pre-order Kokoro in any format before publication on April 4, you can get FREE access to a beautiful seasonal writing sanctuary with me, Beth Kempton. The course is called Spring Light and it is worth £59, but I would like to offer it as a gift to you if you pre-order Kokoro. You can find all the details at bethkempton.com/kokoro.

I hope you will read the book, or listen to me reading the audiobook to you, and let it gently guide you in the direction of a life well-lived. 

At this point in the podcast it would normally be time for our get ahead tips corner. Of course we don’t have any get ahead tips for Christmas in this episode, although I wonder whether some conscious attention to the way we are spending our time, energy and other resources throughout the year might affect how we feel come Christmas this year. Perhaps we could make a shared commitment to paying attention to how we feel in every season this year, and consciously mark the passing of time as shown to us by nature throughout the year.

I invite you to come and join me in March on Instagram @bethkempton for my free community challenge #tinyspringpoem, where I will be posting daily prompts. Spending ten minutes a day writing a tiny poem, for no reason other than it is a fun and nourishing pause, is a really wonderful thing to do.

I will also be posting regular book giveaways on my Instagram @bethkempton throughout March and April and have some gorgeous seasonal and inspiring books lined up to give away so be sure to go and follow me there so you don’t miss them.

Personally I am making a commitment to track the seasons through the kinds of essays I share on my Substack at bethkempton.substack.com which are all free, so do come and subscribe there too so we can stay connected until the Calm Christmas podcast returns later in the year, as autumn gives way to winter.

Until then, I wish you light and hope and days filled with the delicate fragrance of cherry blossom and roses. You have been such a wonderful companion throughout this past winter, and I look forward to meeting you again, at my kitchen table, for hot tea and ginger cake, when the Calm Christmas Podcast returns. Thank you, my friend.

I leave you with this, from the poem Another Spring by Christina Georgia Rossetti in The Language of Spring selected by Robert Atwan.

If I might see another Spring – 

Oh stinging comment on my past

That all my past results in “if” – 

If I might see another Spring

I’d laugh to-day, to-day is brief;

I would not wait for anything:

I’d use to-day that cannot last,

Be glad to-day and sing.

You have been listening to a special episode of the Calm Christmas Podcast with me, Beth Kempton. If you have enjoyed this, you might just love the audiobook edition of my new book KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well-lived, which is available for pre-order now. Let me read to you as we travel together to rural Japan, sit in cosy coffee shops in the rain, seek out wisdom in dojos and temples, climb sacred mountains, and contemplate what it means to cultivate a life well lived.