Trusting the Pie
Imbolc marks the quiet hinge of the year, not spring yet, but the moment when the light begins to return, and the earliest work has to happen whether clarity has arrived or not. Traditionally, it’s a time for tending beginnings: starting seeds, cooking, and preparing the ground before there’s much to see.
That rhythm showed up clearly this week, both in the house and in the studio. Early in the week I cooked for Imbolc, started the last of the early seedlings just before the window closed, and visited ongoing projects without trying to force anything forward prematurely. Illustration work kept moving, slowly, across some very strange in-between terrain. My mandala sketching process shifted into color. Practical pieces slid into place in the background (payments, booking, IA) the kind of infrastructure that doesn’t feel like much progress until suddenly it does.
Energy, however, was scattered. Direction felt foggy. More than once it seemed like I went down into a valley and the signal from Larry Radio dropped out entirely. You could fairly say it wasn’t a focused or especially confident week. And yet systems are now in place, and tiny leaves are coming up in the seed tray.
And then there was the pie.
Not just taste-wise (though it was excellent), but as a kind of marker. The pumpkin pie this year came from pumpkins grown in last summer’s garden and put away carefully for the winter. In our house, blackberries have traditionally been the Imbolc food of choice, and this year Larry delivered blackberry jam to my parents, no shopping list or grocery store chaos required, some of which made its way to our table. The blackberry mini pies were wonderful. But I felt the pull to break tradition this year and put something home-grown on the table as well.
The pumpkins that became the pie in question weren’t planted until early summer last year, but their gardening season — or perhaps their gardener’s season — really began with Imbolc 2025. It felt right to let them open the season to come. I topped the pie with a slightly wonky confectioner’s-sugar peacock, because why not lean into a little badly executed, shameless Mayura self-promotion.
Winter itself is a kind of strange in-between terrain, one that has more to teach about hope than it does about destination. This week felt less like forward motion and more like noticing what was planted, remembering that spring doesn’t require belief to arrive.
