Blog
Epiphany in January
Thursday 15th January 2026
Mike Mullins
Every month the Soul Rewilding community will be sharing reflections from "Soul Garden", our monthly online community gathering. Here is January's meditation on nature and epiphany:
It’s January and the earth, the pilgrim ship in which we sail, begins yet another circumnavigation around the source of life, the sun. In the Christian calendar this is 2026 in the Jewish its 5787, in Islam it's 1448 and in Japan it's 2686. What is time?
It's the morning of 6th of January and I step out early to take a walk on tooting common. It’s still dark. The suns not due to show its face above the horizon until five past eight. It's freezing my breath forms a cloud before me. It's three days since the full moon on the 3rd of January and today is Epiphany.
I head off to the common.
Brown leaves decorate a leaning plane tree. Next to it a rare Dutch elm, bare except for black buds covered in ice. An augury of spring. The common is an ice field. As the sun shows its face the early morning light catches willow, poplar, Hawthorne, great oaks and brambles covered in ice. Ivy still green wraps and shrouds a dead birch tree like a winter green coat. Birch that pathfinder tree that welcomes new horizons, new beginnings. The tree that first colonised Albion after the ice age and prepared the way for beech and oak. Birch with her white and dark striped bark reminds us of courage, resilience and hope at this time of year.
Next to the birch a hawthorn. A sea of red haw berries suspended like an ocean of galaxies in deep space. Each crusted in ice like a sprinkling of sugar on a cake.
The grass of the field upon which I walk each blade is coated in film of ice, the ground hard beneath my feet. Great long tree shadows of the low winter sun reach out across the field and my shadow stretches into the distance like the vague memory of some ancient Celtic warrior Cuchulain, or Finn McCool.
Only the leaves of holly, wild privet and common ivy, remain green in defiance of the winter cold. Holding out a splinter of hope for the return of brother sun and the arrival of spring.
My hands tingle with cold.
The track of an early morning cyclist, late for work perhaps, shoots straight across the common, accompanied by the footsteps of a walker carved in icy grass indentations disappearing mysteriously unseen on the far side of the common. Did they travel together, or separately alone in their own January reverie?
I come across an old dead and fallen oak, last anointed, with frost. Two coal black crows beyond it feeding in the grass. They take flight, skimming low across the grass, landing again, swaggering cockily around, cawing with “sarf” London accents.
I sit beneath a great bare English pedunculate oak, perhaps the mother tree, its acorns shed in last years mast year, lie uneaten, ungerminated and seemingly dead around me. But are they? No, on close glance I realise that knopper wasps have transformed the acorns turning them to brown 'galls' and yes inside the galls, wasp larvae feed on host tissues. Despite appearances life lives on in the cold and dark of January.
The occasional clump of dead brown oak leaves hang from the branches of this mother tree. She’s surrounded by her younger family. Nearby stands an old companion who’s lost his top whilst one of his limbs lies wounded, long and large at his feet.
Are you weary, tired and in pain old oak? Or has witnessing the great passing of time given you wisdom, strength and equanimity? Here you stand on the edge of a new year. How many dawning new years have you witnessed? What was that new year like when you first germinated perhaps protected by blackthorn or bramble? How have things changed since then?
If you stop, drop down, remain still and listen, listen and watch….. you notice so much life going on in the midst of January. Two orange breasted, blue backed, nuthatches run round oak branches above me. Ferreting for insects in the deep bark crevices. One minute upside down clinging to a branch the next scurrying atop the oak’s crown. Then before me I catch sight of a Jay standing sentinel in a hawthorn tree. The cooing of a stock dove. Januarys not dead life has just withdrawn.
In January we too like nature withdraw, wrap up warm, fetch blankets, hot water bottles and sit mesmerised before roaring fires and orange hot coals. We grow fat and slow on cake, mince pies and mulled wine. We slow, lose sight of what day it is. We go inwards and indoors. A mood of rest, of pausing, reflection, percolating, envelopes us.
Perhaps January is the month of depth of patience of trusting unseen inner growth? Stepping back from noise from ambition, from comparison and entering solitude. Not as inactivity but a necessary stillness.
Real wisdom comes not from rushing outward but descending downward. Life unfolds organically, like nature, it can't be forced into clarity.
As Rilke asked:
“How can you be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... to live the questions now.”
Like nature our growth is often invisible and slow like pregnancy. It’s a vitality that persists even in dormancy. We’re asked to trust in time. Answers arriving unannounced and unnoticed.
So, January truly is Epiphany, a sudden clear realisation of insight, a moment when you suddenly understand something deeply important in a new way. A breakthrough, an alignment.