year of the cat

liminal hours & bloodthirsty seclusion

I’ve not shared my word of the year yet, and I’m not sure I will. Not until the last breath of twenty-twenty-three.

I wish to move quietly this year, elusive as a wildcat withdrawing into the narrow hills, into the forever mists. Quietly, slowly - not because I am afraid but because I am certain.

Certain that in the silent cauldron of a moonless corrie I will hear what needs to be heard. Make what needs to made. A sacred, speechless pact between myself and the other unearthly inhabitants of the corrie.

The wildcat has become an unexpected symbol this new year, a foil for the shadow-wolves I spoke of last week. My first story of 2023 (the first for Fireside Ghosts), is named ‘Cat Bride’. The rareness, the reclusive ferocity of this Highland tiger is an energy I hope to capture in the story (and to wear like a skin until the year grows old).

My clan crest is a wildcat, so perhaps I should have adopted her as a personal symbol sooner.

Under her feral glare I will guard my writing hours with bloodthirsty seclusion. I will create in secret, dream in secret. I will hunt at dawn and dusk, for my stories are crepuscular. Every week I add to my collection of moon photos:

I belong to liminal hours. Write vespertine stories. Dawn imparts a honeyed kiss on my eyelids and silver-tongued dusk whispers to my soul. If the world breathed differently I might sleep from noon till twilight. Oh, how easy then to transcribe what’s already written in the scribble of leaves and looping scrolls of spiderweb!

But I am, allegedly, a human, and sometimes find myself walking against the sun, puzzled, forgetting my sacred pact. I must remember how the corrie was carved in silence.

By silent ways, I will receive stories that don’t look like words but feral tracks in the snow, a thread of ebony hair knotted around a branch, smoky candles dripping, dripping in the sodden January wood.

By silent ways, I will perceive their meaning. And by silent ways, I’ll assemble my life.

I find I don’t have any advice to share here, or rather I don’t have the stomach to add to the accumulating pages of what to do and how to be (as if all journeys can be mapped so easily). All I have are these simple offerings; the chewed bones of a kill. I will place them at the edge of the forest, on your doorstep, and perhaps we will come within a handsbreadth of understanding.

Because there is a silent place within you too, where plans are not announced but completed. Where questions are not asked but answered. Where wisdom isn’t learning but un-knowing, and where wildcats hunt on the edge of night.