‘You get to know grey in Scotland in winter. Either you make yourself miserable wishing for summer’s saturated hues, or you embrace grey in all its endless subtleties.’

Samantha Clark – The Clearing. A Memoir of Art, Family and Mental Health. (2020)

When I first started teaching people to use writing to connect to the natural world, I ran a ten week ecotherapy class called Winter Solace. We looked at the beauty of nature through the winter months and talked about using the winter months to take a cue from nature and take a rest.

In grey we can find many shades and hues of colour, something the artist Samantha Clark wrote about in her memoir The Clearing . A beautiful poetic book, with so many themes I could identify with.

We make our own happiness with the narratives we tell ourselves about the world. Instead of focusing on the cold grey winter months, I choose instead to look to everything that is beautiful, dew drops on a spiders web, the delicate veins of a leaf skeleton, the sliding colours of a river…

The world is what we make it.