Happy 2025 :)
It’s funny because I realise that the overall feeling of Christmas is built upon where in the week it lands each year, mainly because I work set days in a place open until Christmas Eve.
So some years I work to the wire and others I have that day before off. Both are wonderful in their own way, but one means I start the festivities pumped and ‘in it’ and others, like this year, I have a more gentle slide. This seems to set the tone for the year ahead and this new year I feel I am starting from a nicely settled place.
That settled place extends to ATTIC and the work we will do this year too. A perfect example is the unexpected invitation I received to host ‘Breathe and Brew’ experiences at the Arnolfini (Bristol’s International centre for contemporary Arts) as part of the closing event for a wonderful exhibition that has been running there since October by the renowned Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. https://arnolfini.org.uk/ Bristol friends please do come join us.
Her exhibition ‘At the edge of the everyday world’ captures poetic images of the beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life and the fragility and gentle rhythms of the natural world. So I feel fairly aligned with this collaboration because, of course, this resonates perfectly with what ATTIC encourages with a daily cup of great tea.
Sitting at the threshold of that incredible liminal space between what is mundane and what is magical, the tea invites us to explore that space within ourselves, from the simplest daily act of patiently brewing to its deeper centring capabilities that the monks first cultivated it for. Once you step through the portal into possibility and choose a more present experience of the everyday, it is possible for us all to be touched by the magic within it. Some days when the evenings are a little lighter and I walk along a tree lined street and hear the blackbird chorus, I am brought to tears. Magic is often a feeling or emotion, not a horse that gets changed into a frog!
Magic (madʒɪk/noun) is defined as ‘the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces’ and luckily can be accessed merely by changing attention. That is our human superpower, our mysterious supernatural force, choosing what and how to attend to the world within and around us.
I have recently been reading a book by Matt Haig. In it, one of the characters, on trying to verbalise a new appreciation of life says:
“There is a word in Spanish, ‘duende’. One connotation of the word comes from the Spanish poet Lorca. It describes that feeling when someone truly connects with the sublime essence of life, its tragedy and beauty, whether in art or flamenco or in nature.”
It is no surprise that many of the activities and notions that shift our attention and enhance our ‘magical’ perception are activating our right hemisphere and thus, steering us away from the logical and into the imaginative. You just need to be open to experiencing things beyond words, tune in and hone that sense of peace you feel when things beyond your influence touch the very heart of who you are. For me it may be blackbirds, for others the sweet taste of the season’s first apple or the cold ocean as it hits the skin. It might come when contemplation allows you to see and understand something of yourself that had previously been in shadow.
But beware, for once you step across the threshold and invite the possibility of magic into the liminal spaces, all sorts of wonderous things might start to happen!
Wishing you a wonderful 2025 and those of you interested in cultivating some of the magical dust of the right hemisphere, follow us on instagram as we begin to explore the exciting world of self-discovery that sits within the mundane world of your daily cup of tea. We hope you will share some of your own stories too.
Have a wonderful month and we look forward to talking to you again in February.
Anne and Ric x