ENCOURAGEMENT FROM A GREY DAY by Liz Manning

 Firstly, apologies for this being so very late - I actually got my dates and days wrong! Anyway, here it is.

The garden is very quiet, still, grey this morning. As I step outside, my hands clasped around a warming mug of coffee, for my daily dose of garden therapy, it’s easy to feel disappointed. And I do. At first.

I miss our regulars: flame fronted robin his song volume belying his size; camouflaged great and blue tits performing acrobatics from the branches; blackbird and his contrasting beak dipped in buttery gold paint pot; even the kiss chasing squirrels have disappeared.

Then I hear two magpies having a to-and-fro discussion in the cypress above me before they fly off. I recognise (and realise that comes easily now) the distinctive flack-flack-flack of a wood pigeon taking flight. Then the surprise of the morning: the pterodactyl shape of a heron flying low across the sky and I work out that it must be travelling from night time perch on the canal to daytime fishing grounds of the local lake.

And I begin to wonder.

What if the lack of activity is telling me something in itself? Why are there fewer birds today? Maybe birds conserve their energy in winter against the cold or have no need to travel so much as there’s no nests to build or young to feed yet. Then again, perhaps their invisibility is a prompt to make our garden more wildlife friendly – time to put the bug hotel Christmas present up, plan some different planting for the spring, consider some bird feeders. (Later on, I discover from the RSPB website that a mild winter means birds don’t need domestic gardens so much for food).

And that led to me thinking about our own times of stillness, quiet, inactivity, lack of obvious progress. What they might tells. How that might be part of how we are meant to be too.

Winter could be seen as a form of Sabbath, a time of stop and restore, just as fields are left fallow for a season to regain their fertility. Perhaps the same could be true of those sterile periods we have as writers.

Just as a daffodil bulb is still a daffodil bulb, whether it’s flowering or waiting underground – you’re still a writer, whether you’re writing or in a waiting time.

A field left fallow looks bare, unproductive, but there are thousands, millions of microbial actions happening slowly restoring the soil’s creative potential. So too all those imperceptible connections being made in your brain, ideas invisibly brewing, experiences building up into potential scenarios, whenever you doing or not doing something other than writing.

So if this third lockdown or the ongoing pandemic is proving a time of inactivity, greyness, apparently unproductiveness for you, don’t despair. Don’t be afraid of fallow periods, of dark nights of the writerly soul – God is still working on and in you, His writer.