What I Am Wearing, Reading and Loving This Winter
There is a specific pleasure in writing this kind of piece.
Not the teaching piece that asks something of me intellectually. Not the personal essay that asks something of me emotionally. Just the honest and particular account of what is currently filling my days and my wardrobe and my reading stack. The small and specific things that are making this winter genuinely liveable.
Here is where I actually am right now.
What I Am Wearing
Winter has arrived properly and with it the specific relief of returning to the clothes that feel most essentially mine.
I have been living in my Henne jeans this season. If you know Henne you understand. If you do not, they are the kind of denim that manages to be simultaneously the most comfortable and the most considered thing in the wardrobe. The specific quality of something designed by people who genuinely thought about what a woman's body actually is rather than what fashion has decided it should be. I wear them with everything and feel neither underdressed nor overdressed in any situation, which is the quiet genius of genuinely good basics.
The knit I keep reaching for is also Henne. A mid weight that sits in that specific territory between a lightweight summer knit and a full winter jumper. The colour is that warm oatmeal that is almost not a colour at all and that goes with everything precisely because of that.
My current obsession is a Witchery black lace top that I have been wearing under everything. There is something about black lace in winter that feels simultaneously practical and quietly subversive. The sacred feminine tradition has always understood black as the colour of Sophia's cosmic womb, of pure potential, of the fertile darkness from which all creation arises. I think about this when I wear it and feel unreasonably pleased with myself for doing so.
And the cashmere pink knits. I have two. One a deep dusty rose and one a lighter almost blush. Both carrying that specific quality of genuine cashmere that synthetic fibres spend a great deal of money and effort trying to approximate and never quite achieving. There is something specifically Venusian about a genuinely good pink cashmere knit in winter. The warmth of it. The specific quality of being held by something genuinely soft.
What I Am Reading
My reading stack this winter reflects where I am on the path. Deeper and more varied than it has been in a while.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I came to this late and I understand now why people speak of it the way they do. It is a genuinely large book in the way that certain novels are large, not in page count but in the specific quality of what they are attempting and largely achieving. The timshel teaching at its heart, the understanding that the human being is capable of choosing good rather than being determined toward either good or evil, is one of the most quietly radical things I have read in recent memory. I am reading it slowly. It deserves the slowness.
Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh. I want to be honest here because I think the Rose Garden is where honesty lives most comfortably. I am reading this because it is genuinely compelling and because the sacred feminine path has taught me that genuine pleasure in reading, the kind that makes you stay up later than you intended and resent every interruption, is not a lesser activity than the improving kind. Hathor would approve. She understood delight as sacred practice.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation writing about the intelligence of plants and the specific quality of relationship available between human beings and the natural world when the natural world is understood as alive and intelligent rather than as resource. Every page is Sophia speaking through the natural world in the language that science and indigenous wisdom share at their deepest point of genuine meeting. I am reading this one page at a time in the early mornings. It rewards that quality of attention.
What I Am Eating
Winter cooking is its own practice on the sacred feminine path.
The specific pleasure of things that take longer than they need to. A soup given three hours rather than thirty minutes. A slow roast that fills the house with the specific fragrance of something being genuinely transformed by patient heat. Bread from a baker who understands bread as a craft.
I have been making golden milk in the evenings. Turmeric and ginger and a good milk and honey and a small amount of rose water that I add at the end because rose water makes most things quietly better. The specific quality of warmth it produces in the body is the Venusian frequency in its most immediate and most practical form.
And citrus this winter. The specific brightness of good oranges and mandarins in the grey months. Sophia in vitamin form.
What I Am Loving
The specific quality of winter light in the late afternoon. Lower and more oblique than the summer light. More honest somehow. Less flattering and more interesting.
Lighting candles earlier than seems strictly necessary because winter earns the candlelight and I am not going to be precious about when it begins.
The pink cashmere knit and a genuinely good book and the specific quality of a winter evening that has nowhere it needs to be.
Walking in the cold with proper layers and the specific aliveness that cold air produces in the body when the body is warm enough to receive it rather than to brace against it.
Making rose water. Still. Always. The specific quality of patience the practice requires continues to be the teaching I most need on any given day.
Long conversations with women I genuinely trust. The specific quality of winter as a season that invites depth over breadth, genuine intimacy over social performance.
And the specific pleasure of a wardrobe that feels genuinely mine this season. The Henne denim and the cashmere knits and the black lace and the rose gold silk scarf from Byron Bay that has somehow made it through to winter and shows no signs of being ready to retire.
A Small Confession
The Rose Garden is my favourite thing to write.
Not because it is the easiest. Because it is the most honest. The most specific. The most impossible to produce from anywhere other than the actual texture of the actual daily life being genuinely lived.
The sacred feminine path is not only in the ceremony and the descent and the genuine initiations.
It is in the Henne denim worn on an ordinary Wednesday.
It is in the Steinbeck read slowly by winter candlelight.
It is in the golden milk with rose water at the end of a day that asked more than expected.
It is in all of this.
The whole specific and ordinary and genuinely sacred winter life.
What are you wearing, reading and loving this winter? Tell me in the comments.
