Since the summer solstice, I’ve noticed an uncomfortable pull inside me, what could be called a kind of seasonal sadness. If we were in the depths of winter, I might have called this Seasonal Affective Disorder but I realise, this isn’t a ‘disorder’ at all. To feel a sense of sadness or even what you might call a subtle grief, at the turning of the wheel of the year, feels right, appropriate and perfectly natural. If we tune in closely enough, remembering we are the Earth, the elements and the seasons, we might feel as if part of us is turning with the Earth, waning like the Sun, pulling away, already slowly letting go.
I feel this pang of sadness when I see the dry, sun-scorched grass, the faded lavender that just two weeks ago was vibrant and humming with bees. I feel it when noticing the growing rosehips and haws and hearing the occasional crispiness of a dried leaf already underfoot. I feel it in the quality of light in the late evenings, with the slow shortening of the days.
The great wheel, our great Mother Earth is turning so gently it could even be missed but somewhere inside it stirs me, as I’m sure it does many others. My body seems to feel it, and my emotions move with that turning too and respond.
I wonder if all of nature (in their own relative ways,) feels this subtle sorrow that can arrive in high summer, just as nature reaches her fullest seasonal potential? It’s almost a cliché to say ‘all that blooms must fade’ because we know that intellectually, it’s obvious. But really feeling it seems like a deeper layer into the whole of our earthly experience.
Knowing and feeling that this peak of summer is also the beginning of the fade into winter’s decay feels unsettling, but is helping me to have more confidence in the whole cyclical process. It helps me remember that death and decay in nature (including our ‘human nature’,) contains within it rebirth, and vice versa.
During winter, the seeds, bulbs and buds are already there, waiting for their moment in spring; just after the summer solstice as summer officially begins, so do the shortening days – the end of summer is contained within the beginning. This is helping me to see how the peak always contains the trough, just as the trough contains the peak; that the zenith contains the nadir, the dark night of the soul contains the transformation and renewal – it’s all two sides of the same coin, the same waves ebbing and flowing within the same ocean.
Despite my growing trust in this cycle of fade and renewal, I still find myself challenged by the sensation of ‘loss’ as I tune in and witness it played out in nature.
I can’t help but wish that those cooler, lush, green days of mid-spring were still here. That time of peak-greening feels like the shortest of all the seasons. The winter wait feels so long and when eventually the full lushness of Beltane arrives, the blooming and growing season seems to gather apace and come and go in the blink of an eye, leaving me feeling a bit left behind.
This year, I didn’t manage to plant all the seeds I intended to, both physically and also metaphorically. The months from March to June disappeared so quickly, even as I tried to savour them, remembering the speed at which they pass. And now here I am, watching the light begin its slow retreat, feeling a little unsettled by that subtle sense of loss and longing.
Perhaps it is more pronounced for me because I struggle in the heat of summer. The surgeries I had some years ago for Crohn’s disease/UC, puts me in the ‘at risk’ category for severe heatwaves, as day-to-day I live with issues magnified by high temperatures. I have no choice but to slow down in summer and align with that waning energy. Like many sensible creatures, I stay mostly inside during the day when it’s very hot, venturing out only in the early morning, when the temperatures are cool enough to withstand sustainably. Where others can enjoy uninhibited, daytime, outdoor summer activities, I inhabit the edges, the boundaries, the more liminal in between times and spaces, out of necessity.
I think there’s many lessons here too around surrendering to what is – listening and responding to the body and the earth, both one and the same. The slow waning of the summer season into winter, into nature’s resting phase, is so much longer than nature’s ‘youthful’ growth phase, just like our own. We do need to savour and appreciate our experience as it speeds up and flies by. It also serves as a constant reminder to me that our own ‘fading’ as human-nature-beings, our process of aging and death, is part of the exact same cycle. And if the fading phase in nature contains within it its rebirth and renewal, what might that be showing and telling us about the unseen elements of our human-nature-being experience? What might we be missing?
One of my favourite thoughts around all this at the moment is pondering ‘what if our bodies are simply the seed casings for our true nature? A shell/husk of flesh that, just like our brothers and sisters in the botanical world display, a seed case must be relinquished when the time is right, in order to become what we always were, both what we came from and what we were always intended to be? There’s so much food for thought there!
My prior Buddhist training has also taught me that we suffer when we try and grasp at what is impermanent, so for me to constantly bemoan the loss of those lush, green days would only create my own suffering. But knowing this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognise the sensitivity and tenderness inherent in experiencing the sense of loss within these cycles too. It isn’t about denial or intellectual dismissal, but something to lean into with what my Dharma teachers would call ‘Openness, Clarity and Sensitivity’ and an opportunity to notice that the experience of these cycles, summer leading to winter – the birth, fade, decay, rebirth, is ‘all of a piece’ as my teacher would also say.
Although I love Autumn and all the colourful displays and golden days, and the ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’, there’s something still tugging at me in this ‘spring to summer to autumn’ threshold.
I’m noticing that at the summer solstice and here at nearly mid-July we are deeply between what was and what is to become. I believe this post-Summer Solstice space (these weeks, not just the few days around Solstice) is just as a liminal and potent as other times of the year like Samhain, when it is said the ‘veil’ is especially thin.
So, rather than grasp at what I wish was still here, or push away the feelings of the sense of loss, I’m trying to honour what I’m feeling, to name it and welcome it for what it’s teaching me. I realise full well that in the scheme of the horrors of the current world situation, to even have the space, peace and time to notice and contemplate any of this, I’m deeply privileged indeed.
So in this in between time, I’m learning to hold space for this sensation of subtle loss that live in the summer’s turning, not as a ‘seasonal disorder’ but as a reminder that we are part of nature, we are turning too. Nature’s shifts live within us and I want to notice, align with and honour them.
The more we tune into the seasonal cycles inwardly and feel them within us, the more we understand our place within the bigger picture and our own seasons and cycles that we can’t avoid. We can extrapolate nature’s wisdom to our human-nature-being experience. We can begin to sense ourselves entangled within the bigger, bittersweet, seasonal cycle that contains both joy and beauty and loss and sadness. We can keep exploring all this and feeling into it deeper and deeper with each season, until perhaps we can find a place of peace within the perpetual spiralling cycle of rebirth, the ebbing and flowing dance of impermanence.
A Simple Ritual: Honouring the Season’s Turning
If you feel this subtle seasonal sadness too, you might like to try this little evening ritual (or use it as a framework to create your own,) to witness it and appreciate the cycles within and without:
You’ll need:
- A candle (to represent the light that’s both waning and ever present) (Optional: a fire proof dish and tongs)
- A little bundle of dried herbs for incense such as rosemary, or use fresh to smell and waft around if burning is impractical.
- A pen and a small piece of paper. Optional: a journal for deeper reflection
Optional: a drum, rattle or shaker
1. Designate your sacred space in your usual way. Light the candle. If you can do this outside at dusk, all the better, (but do look out for any moths drawn to your naked flame and use a lantern if possible!) Sit quietly with your candle in the liminal dusk, sit with the fading light and take a few deep breaths. Allow yourself to feel the seasonal shift and see and feel yourself as part of the web of interconnections and transformations. Feel the seasons and elements living within you. You might even like to say to yourself:
“I honour the turning. I honour the waning. I honour this subtle grief, this mourning, this yearning and transforming within me.”
2. Light your incense bundle from the candle. (Or hold aloft and smell your fresh herbs). Offer the smoke (or scent) to the air. Offer gratitude to the air that is our breath, remembering the in, out and pause of the breath is mirroring the ebb and flow of the seasons, of all life. Sense receiving the gift of life on the in-breath, sense offering a gift to our green kin on the out breath. In -receive, out- offer. Feel that deep, reciprocal connection with all that is.
3. Contemplate what is turning, changing, waning in your life, inner and outer, in tune with the season. Honour your interconnection with nature with your noticing. Mourn what needs to be mourned. Celebrate even your smallest growth and count all your blessings with gratitude. Hold space for the both/and – any sadness and gratitude. You may wish to take your time to first journal all your thoughts around this.
On the piece of paper, write a short note to mother nature, thanking her for all you appreciated about her greenest months, all you have enjoyed so far and all you are grateful for in your life.
On the next line, simply name all you’ll miss, acknowledging the cycle and your gratitude for its return next year. You can also acknowledge any struggles and difficulties.
Next, list the things you are gladly releasing and what you are welcoming in its place.
3. Relight (if needed) the herb bundle and hold space for both the sadness and the gratitude. Declare that you are willing and ready to release all that needs to wane, to change, transform and be released within you. Allow the smoke (or scent) to waft around you, cleansing and purifying.
Contemplate the candle flame as the same energy and fire light as the sun, that is both waning and constant. The sun appears to fade and set but is in fact unmoving, ever present, ever burning brightly. What does that point to within our own experience?
When you’re ready, fold the paper and place it beneath the candle and imagine your intentions travelling up into the candle and into the flame and releasing. You can burn the paper using tongs and a fireproof dish if it is safe to do so. You could also tear and compost the paper into the earth when you’re finished.
4. If you wish, you could do some drumming at this point. Below is a simple chant of mine that you’re welcome to use or adapt, which can also be drummed and sung:
“I honour the turning, The change and unfurling, I honour the turning, The yearning in me.
I honour the waning, The rest and the dreaming, I honour the waiting, the stillness in me.
I honour the mourning, The fade and rebirthing, I honour the turning, and the cycles in me.”
6. Blow the candle out into the dusk and pause to sit in the darkness for a time. Resting and dreaming until you’re ready to move into whatever you are doing next. Notice that even in this pause and change from ritual to mundane, from task to task, is a little death and rebirth.
Close/open your sacred space.
When we make time and space to honour our feelings and the cycles we are part of, like the ritual above, we create sacred connections and reciprocity, and engage in a graceful acceptance and surrendering to the natural order of things. It makes space for the paradox of the ‘all-at-once’ – the sadness and the joy/beauty, the grief and the gratitude. Our awareness, that’s perhaps resides in our heart-space, has room to hold it all. This experience and exploration can perhaps be approached with a sense of mystery, curiosity and sacredness, with gratitude and grace.
May you feel held at this threshold of the slow turning. May you find your own connection and rhythm in our beautiful Earth’s cycles, and may you have the time and space to honour it all.
If you’d ever like to explore the possibility of a 1:1 ritual with me, perhaps a ‘croning’ ritual for the menopause, or a seasonal or threshold ritual like the above, do feel free to get in touch.
Safety note: Always be careful using herbs (and even handling some fresh herbs if you are pregnant etc.) especially when using smoke in a confined space, always check any allergies or contraindications you may have with herbs, they are very potent! Know the difference between the poisonous or irritant ones, and if the smoke is safe for you and pets etc. Dried herbs can also pose a significant fire hazard indoors or outdoors – especially during a dry summer.
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