Reclaiming pleasure

I received unexpected medicine on my daily walk.

I’ve been exploring why accessing pleasure feels harder during winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

It’s natural to feel pleasure in the other seasons. The bloom of a flower, the warmth of sun-kissed skin, pastel pink clouds in the late evening, picking a ripe fruit from a tree, all the way through to the delightful shades of orange and brown.

In the winter months, everything changes. It’s dark, cold, damp, and the air is tinged with depression. Finding pleasure outside feels less… available.

So I went to lay a winter prayer by the lake, and before I knew it, I was sitting on the cold ground amongst composting leaves, communing with birds, exploring sticks and stones. Singing and dancing in the mud.

It was a practice I never imagined was available at this time of year. And I have to give credit to my daughter for inviting me into her world of curiosity. (Read: It was nap time but she was more interested in the ducks).

I’m sure onlookers were confused. Sitting on the frozen ground, in winter, in England? Who does that?

🙋🏻‍♀️ Me. I do that.

Then, I saw her.

A single pink rose lying on the earth. No rose bushes anywhere nearby. She made no sense. And yet she was unmistakably there.

Half vibrant pink, half golden brown, she held the full cycle: beauty + decay, birth + death, joy + grief, pleasure + pain.

When I held her to my chest, she whispered:

“Eros is holiness, not sinfulness.'

Erotic innocence returns with a reclamation of the body as sacred, the heart as sovereign, and the womb as compass.”

A reminder that pleasure is a birthright in every season.

That true eros is nature moving through us. Universal life force. It doesn’t have to be performative. And it does not need to feed the insatiable underbelly of a commodified society.

Innocence returns when shame dissolves. And pleasure can be reclaimed through the eyes of child-like wonder, in every moment.

Re-enchantment of the ordinary opens the floodgates of pleasure. It lives in the exalted joy I arrived here with. The return home happens through sensation, not thought, and in a frequency entirely different from what the world once taught would make me worthy.

Then came a vision from the rose, as I sat there in the dirt.

A grey box appears, labeled: “all of my pleasure”. Previously it would have been reserved for malevolent forces and handed over for free. No questions asked.

But today the box begins to burst open, overflowing with birds of paradise, fiddlehead ferns, and buzzing insects.

The box sprouted bright green leaves, alive and trembling, and then ceremonially dropped them to the ground, golden brown.

A weighted veil was lifted.

The box was laid to rest.

And on its tombstone lay a single Rose.

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
May the earth soften us.
May the cold remind us we are alive.
May the body return to its rightful throne;
holy, unashamed, unarmoured,

May the child within lead us back
to wonder, play, and wisdom beneath our feet.

May we remember that pleasure is not a luxury,
but a gift we have unlimited access to.

May shame fall away like leaves returning to soil,
and may every exhale release what is no longer ours to carry.

May the rose within,
both blooming and decaying,
teach us that beauty and death are sisters,
and love is what survives them both.

And may we rise rooted, in breath, and prayer, full of life.

Amen
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