A hum below the glum...

January may feel like the bottom of the world - dark, cold, wet, murky and sleepy - but listen carefully, and you'll detect a faint hum of activity! Be it dream or scheme, hobby or enterprise, study or creativity, it's probably just about at simmer-point now. After all, nature's spring begins a long time before we spot its first signs, and what are we, if not part of that nature? Yes, we're coming out of hibernation too, refreshed! Christmas is done and dusted and we're free and fit to move forward, with any luck!

I'm suddenly busy with rhymes, for instance - they're springing up all around me and sometimes it's all I can do just to catch them! It's the same with tunes: they seem to sprout up at me out of the garden squelch, the horizon's mist, the kitchen's pile of Christmas leftovers, or perhaps they're just emanating from post-Christmas relief.

As for actual work - the nitty-gritty of workshop planning, performance-revising, flyer-sending and all the rest of it - well, what could be a more conducive setting for it all than a Christmas-cheered, fire-warmed, lamp-lit room, cosily curtained by that steady grey drizzle down the window?

There'll be tougher times ahead, I know: dawn drives through deluges to unknown schools in unknown towns, followed by dashes through the downpours from car to entrance, probably to find it's the wrong entrance, or wrong school, or that I've left my guitar in the car, or at home. There'll be the creepy night drives too, to gardening clubs, over 50s gatherings, or whoever may have kindly invited me to brighten up their cold, dark evening. Yes, when I get there, it'll be my job do that, however chilly and soggy and drive-stressed I am by then - a fact that I'll be pinching myself awake about through SatNav's 'Re-calculating!'s and 'Do a U-turn!'s... And then there'll be the even darker, colder drives home, and then the stark, day-break rising for the next distant school...

But that's fine: it'll be one big adventure, as usual, and I'll love it once it's happening, especially after this snug winter's hibernation! Yes, January is okay: we need a murky window to huddle behind, a gloomy day to slump in, an enveloping fog to float about in - a little pause of the clock to bring us back up to the mark, freshly sharpened for spring.

Happy New Year, and all the best with your dreams and schemes, whatever they may be!

KateWebsite: poemsforfun.wordpress.com