A Year of Simple Living: A Month-by-Month Guide to Creating a Mindful, Handcrafted Life

Something has gone missing from the modern year. Not time, exactly, though there never seems to be enough of it. Something quieter than that: the sense of the season outside the window, the smell of what is growing and ripening and dying back, the knowledge of what to do with your hands on a wet October afternoon. The rhythm that makes a life feel like a life rather than a sequence of days. A Year of Simple Living brings it back. Organized around the turning year, from the seed catalogues of January to the candlelit evenings of December, this is a book about living in attentive relationship with the natural world rather than merely alongside it.
Each month has its own character, its own practices, its own particular pleasures: the first nettles of March, the elderflower cordial of June, the blackberry jam of August, the beeswax candles of October. Four dedicated projects chapters, one for each season, provide detailed instructions and templates for the handcrafted practices that give the year its texture: botanical inks, natural fabric dyeing, herbal preparations, wreaths, fire starters, and more. The practices here are designed for real kitchens and real lives.
A city windowsill or a country garden. An hour on a Tuesday evening or a whole slow Saturday. Whatever the season is offering, there is something here to meet it. Come back the following January and find that the year is richer for having been paid attention to. The seasons have always been here. This book helps you live in them.