the wolf month

surviving january's leanest hours

I am writing to you as frost rimes the earth and flashes of ice silver gutters and paths. Snow drifts from the feathery sky, a reminder that winter is far from over. My ancestors knew this time as Am Faoilleach - the wolf month. So named because during this time the wolves were at their most famished and dangerous.

This January I find myself stalked by shadow-wolves, lean and meagre creatures that prey upon loneliness and gnaw at the bones of hope. Self-doubt howls within, fierce as the winds without.

Am Faoilleach. A time where it is so easy to act from a dark slope of scarcity instead of alignment and trust.

Late last night, my diary upon my knees, I asked of the blank page, How can January’s shadow-wolves be kept from the door? By night their celestial eyes cast a fierce glimmer that drives away sleep, and by day I find the ghostly print of their paws in the snow.

After much glancing back and hurrying forwards I feel it easiest to simply let the shadow-wolves flit alongside me. I won’t try to outrun them. Nor threaten them with the lantern’s fiery glow or the glint of a sharp knife. I’ll even feed them. Not the bones of despair they’re used to picking at, but the very heart of desire, dark with blood.

Let them flank me as I move through the wood, desire’s blood warm in their bellies, starlight in their eyes, and ashy pelts bristling, even on the leanest days. Let not the company of wolves chase me from my dreams, but aid me in reaching them.

I think back to my first walk of the new year. The moon glowed on the return journey down the snow-crusted hill, a bright disc in the twilight that stopped me in my tracks more than once. I cradled the moon between my fingers and felt a moment of connectedness I often experience when walking at the liminal time of dusk.

I can only describe the sensation as one of being enough. As a tree or river is enough. Mortal worries felt small and separate from my true nature, a nature belonging more to an icy sheet of grass under a brilliant moon than a society haggard by hustle and the immaterial. I felt I already held every desire in the palm of my hand.

That conviction helped me start 2023 by drafting the first story for Fireside Ghosts. It’s turned out to be a feral tale of a haunted bothy and the fierce wildcat that stalks women’s souls, needling our blood to frenzy. I can already tell that the stories in this final book will be ‘received’ rather than ‘made’.

It feels like an unearthly and sure-footed step into the new year - something to feed the shadow-wolves with when they next come howling.