Entering the Winter Otherworld
In this final episode of the Autumn 2023 season, I’m offering some ideas about what the Winter Solstice time actually is and how to work with the energies of January.
If the Autumn is the great dying, and Spring is the great rebirth, what is the Winter? It is the time in-between, after death and before something is born again. In this episode, we explore why this period between the Winter Solstice and the first stirrings of Spring invites us into a great dreaming, where we tend to our inner soil, our deep visions, and trust that new life will come when it’s time.
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Megan: Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, writer, amateur ecologist, and vocational guide.
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome, I'm so glad that you are here sharing this space with me. This is the final episode in our autumn season on death and darkness. We are here just a couple of days before the winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, the longest night. And in my neck of the woods and among the people that I'm in life with, things seem pretty crunchy.
It seems like life is a lot these days for many people. And that's, it's totally okay if that is not true for you right now. I don't want to project anything on, but, um, I know for me and my little family, you know, we've been sick. The holiday busyness is been a lot and we are just trying to negotiate all of that and I know many people going through similar experiences this time of year and I think a lot of times the winter solstice sort of gets pushed aside for the Christmas holiday, and I think that's unfortunate, even though there are many things about the Christmas holiday that sort of mirror old celebrations around this time.
The solstice itself, the darkest day, the shortest day of the year. Is a really important turning point in the year. This is it. This is what it means to live rhythmically is to be aware of these seasonal shifts and embrace them and give them a little bit of attention, bring them into your life in some way.
And after the winter solstice, the light will begin to build and return again. stepping into the lighter part of the year, and the light will grow and grow until the summer solstice in June. And if you're having feelings about that, if you're not feeling very excited about the return of the light, know that you're not alone, and see if you can try to keep up with your darkness practice.
You know, the light isn't going to come right away. It's going to take a couple of months to sort of notice the shift and so you still have time to really let the darkness soak in. Give yourself what you can. Really go into your cocoon, your den, your darkness as much as you need to while you can and while it's sort of in sync with the rest of the natural world.
Today I want to talk about what this time is. is and how we can work with it, sync up with it, where are we headed next? Um, and a spoiler alert, it may not be the super, um, productive, clear New Year vibes of the Gregorian calendar that our dominant culture here likes to sort of embrace, um, but it is a really, I think, potentially mystical, dreamy, productive in a different way window between the winter solstice and in bulk or the first signs of spring, and I'll talk more about that in a moment.
So I'm excited to share today and see what lands for you and how this can support you this time of year. Before I take us into our opening invocation, I'll just share two quick announcements. One is a big thank you to those of you who have supported the show financially this year. Also, huge thank you to those of you who have shared the show this year with your friends or loved ones or, you know, in other means.
Thank you so much. It makes a big difference. Big, big difference. If this podcast is meaningful to you and you have the bandwidth, it would be really wonderful. I would be delighted if you helped make it more sustainable by contributing financially, either once or monthly. You can learn more at buymeacoffee.
com slash Megan Leatherman. If that's not possible for you, just sharing it with others is also wonderful and so appreciated. So thank you for being a part of this and helping make it real. I also want to let you know that this is the last episode of the autumn season, like I mentioned. It has been such a joy to move through this season with you.
Thank you to all of the guests who have shared their time and their insights with us. I will be doing a winter season, and I'm planning on releasing that starting in early February, so you can stay tuned about that. That I'm pretty sure our theme is going to be alternate futures. I want to explore some different ways of thinking about what's possible for us.
How, what is possible in terms of how we relate to one another, to the land, to the other beings that we share this planet with, I want to help us stretch into new visions about what is possible. And, um, today's episode will be a sort of foreshadowing of that next season of the show. So with that, why don't I share our opening invocation and then we'll dive in.
May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with. I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on.
Okay, so I want to kind of set the scene for us today and in line with the winter solstice being a really just kind of magical time, I want to invite you to imagine that you and I are in a snowy landscape somewhere. It's beautiful. It's so still. The snow makes everything so quiet. That the evergreens are In really bright, beautiful contrast to the white snow, it is completely safe here.
You might notice if it's sunny or overcast or stormy. We are really in the wonder of winter here, and we're here to see and learn and dream differently. We are absolutely strong enough and courageous enough to be with the risk and the harshness of the winter season, the storms. And we can see the beauty inside of all of it.
And so we make our way through this beautiful landscape, and we come to a remote cabin, where there's a warm fire in the hearth, there's rich rugs and blankets, and there's a hot mug of your favorite beverage waiting for you. And so the snow is falling outside, it's a little bit stormy and ominous, and we come to dream into the winter solstice together.
The winter solstice is the time right after a death has occurred. The autumn season was the dying, and now we are here, death has happened. What once was is no longer. It may not look the same. It has been given back to the earth. A new process is underway. What happens after death? The truth is that we don't entirely know.
Many people believe that the soul leaves the body and travels to the other world, which has many names. We can't say for sure what the soul does after it leaves the body, but there are many ideas. There have been visions of the other world, there have been little stories or glimmers or people who have had near death experiences who come back and tell us a little bit about it.
They might tell stories about a reunion with loved ones or ancestors. There might be a lot of joy or fun or a feeling of just becoming part of a very large something. There may be, you know, it may be that the soul is doing work in the soul realm that needs to happen. It may be waiting or making commitments before it returns to reincarnate into its next life form.
We don't really know, but the soul goes somewhere if you believe in a soul or a spirit. For those of us not actually dead, our closest approximation is probably dreaming. We travel at night as our soul might travel after we die. We visit long lost places, familiar places, mystical places. We meet people we know and don't know.
We do the sort of necessary psychic exploration that We need to do and our bodies repair as we take those journeys. The animals that hibernate at this time get closer to death than we ever could as their bodies shift into a very in between state. Not quite alive and not quite dead and I think we could pretty safely assume that they dream as well.
The bodies of the plants and the animals, including humans who don't hibernate, who have actually died, start to become the soil again, and inside that soil there are seeds that lay dormant, alive but not active, not activated, and maybe the seeds dream too, I don't know. But all of us are in some great in between time now, from the winter solstice on December 21st until February 1st or so, when we begin to see the very first signs of spring.
And this is known in the wheel of the year as embolc, or the quickening. It's a time when what has been planted begins to show signs of life, but it may be barely perceptible. It may be that not everyone, not every seed, not every creature is ready to awaken yet. It's the very first stirrings. And I think January is a uniquely mystical month.
that gets kind of misconstrued. I feel like we're either sad and hungover from the holiday rush or we go straight into like planning and resolutions and execution of new commitments for the year. But what if this time is actually a time when your soul wants to go on a journey or when you need to be dreaming a lot more?
What if it is a truly in between time before a soul has decided to come back into the body and be reborn in the spring? If you feel any relief or excitement, from the idea that you could take a journey way out beyond what you thought was possible for your life and come back to life in the spring with new visions and a new level of fertility to make those visions real, then this January is for you.
And I hope that some of us work with it a little bit differently this year than maybe we have in the past. I want to say a quick word about timing and natural cycles before I talk about sort of January specifically. And I want to say that there are creatures who are giving birth in the winter time.
Bears especially give birth in their dens while hibernating. There are eagles who are laying their eggs and hatching their chicks in the winter season, depending on the region. So you are on your own clock. You are the expert on your own creative life cycles. But the dreaming, the floating between worlds, that is a necessary step that we don't want to skip.
Because if we do, our longings become hollow. They don't have enough energy behind them to really guide us. What we will birth will be maybe premature or not as Uh, deeply rooted as it could be. So even if we do give birth, you know, bear cubs born in the den stay in that den and nurse for quite a while after being born.
It's not the sort of instantly seen active birth of like a foal or a fawn in the spring. It's a quiet birth. They are in the dark, very close to their mother, unseen and unexposed for quite a while. So I just wanted to. Give that caveat before I talk about maybe holding off a little bit on birth, um, at least for the month of January, in case you are someone who is on a sort of different timeline, some of that bear or eagle timing, and I trust that completely.
So, I will say that there is a lot to support this idea that January is a great in between period and one of the things that supports that is that the primary zodiac sign that the sun is in during this period is Capricorn here in the northern hemisphere. Capricorn is symbolized by the sea goat, a creature that is half fish and half goat.
It is a cardinal earth sign, meaning that it It initiates us into a new cycle, and it is said to rule the knees, the joints, the teeth, and the skeletal system. So, I think a lot of times people sort of tune into the goat part of this. Sign and archetype, and we miss the fish part, and that's because we also miss what the fish is associated with, the depths, the mystery, the flow, and I'm finding that it's really helpful in this period between the winter solstice and embolc to cultivate a state of mind that is fish like, because the goats ascent, the goats climb, will very quickly become dry and arid without its connection to the water, which is your psyche, your intuition, your sort of magical connections, the synchronicities you notice, your emotional flow.
And I trust that you already know how to cultivate this, but I want to give you some ideas in case you find them helpful. I want to encourage you this January to really go dark. To Be private about what's on your heart and what you're working through, the visions that you're having for your year to come.
I want to encourage you to get off social media for a while, to not publish anything maybe, to not consume other people's work, but to create your own work, to not share your visions for 2024 until in bulk on February 1st or later, or until they feel so ripe within you that you know they are firmly planted and rooted and of you.
So that's the fish part of this sign. The goat. Wisdom that I think is here is the sense of challenge, healthy challenge, healthy ambition. We're talking about the body where, you know, the goat is low to the earth. It has a very firm grip. Mountain goats especially have perfectly adapted hooves to grip on to rock.
It's a reminder to really climb the hills and the mountains that are worthy of you and your heart. Consider what your ambition is for. Is it connected to the depths of you? To what you know when you're dreaming or hibernating? If not, Why not? Why aren't your ambitions out in the world connected to who you are when you're dreaming?
Or who you are when you go dark and offline? You know, the goat will work hard. You will work hard. You probably You already do, you have. But how do you quench your thirst as you work hard? What if this year you focused on taking one very aligned wise step at a time in service to your deepest self? And if you don't know who that deepest self is or how to listen to it, see if you can go back into the darkness and come back into the medicine of the winter solstice.
Go to the ocean, go into your internal ocean, turn everything off and really listen. Come back into your body and I bet you will hear and receive what it is that you need. And in terms of the sort of goat's wisdom here and the kind of ascent or movement that Capricorn invites us into, I want to say that rather than starting to execute any of your ideas or plans in January, see if fertility and stability is needed in the environment first.
This is an excellent time to really tend to your own inner soil so that what is planted, the visions that come, your desires, the things you want to do in the world this year, um, the work that is calling to you, the challenges that are calling to you, they will have a much easier time coming to life if they're planted in rich soil.
So, This is a great time to be active in the realms of your health, your mental constructs and how you think of yourself and the world and what's possible for you, your physical environment, you know, if you want to go on a cross country road trip this year, how is your car? Or do you, are you able to afford a rental car and what could that take?
What would that require? It's okay, it's wonderful actually to make shifts in the areas around your ambitions and visions. We don't have to dive right into the direct work of them. It's absolutely wonderful and helpful to tend to the soil that they're about to be planted in. January is really for the indirect but necessary work of expanding and becoming a friendly home for new cycles in our lives, and I talk about this a lot in my book Winter at Work, which is for people experiencing a vocational winter, a fallow time in their working life, and I go through each of the three main zodiac signs in the winter season and how to sort of flow with the wisdom that is here in this season in terms of our working lives.
So you can learn more about that at the link in the show notes if you want. Um, the clarity and the clues that we get right now, may not be plentiful or even very clear. Dream work, soul work, is not like cognitive work, but it often has an emotional simplicity and energy behind it that feels good and true and sustainable.
And that's really what I want for you this January, to be able to tune into something so vast and true and restorative that it can feed you for a long time. That's really what the Winter Solstice and its ripple effects offer us. When we skate over it, and we go right into, you know, the festivities, and then the planning, and then the ex starting to execute the plans and the commitments, and we tell everyone what our resolutions are, we miss the opportunity to really expand our sense of what is possible and receive visions for ourselves that are different than what we might just think up for ourselves.
And all of the episodes that We've gone through in this autumn season Have really been about how to access new visions and all of that can sort of culminate for you in the winter solstice time and in January, you know, you can contemplate your death and receive clarity about what you want to do in your life this year.
That way, you can meditate on the spider and how she spins a web every day and creates a structure strong enough to support her and catch the food that she needs without having to go out and get it. You could consider the crow and how this creature seems to be between the worlds. You could Go back into your darkness practice and spend more time there.
You could communicate with the dead on the other side and ask them to give you clarity about where you're meant to be focusing this year. You don't have to think this up on your own. That's not even possible. Like, you're part of this vast web of consciousness. So, what you're envisioning for yourself is already divinely inspired.
But, my invitation is to open up that tap a little bit wider, stay there a little bit longer, and see what you can bring from the depths of you and how that can motivate you and support your sort of earthly exploration of that this year, rather than going just straight into like, what is the mountain I want to climb and how am I going to do that?
Um, because so often I see that This very natural, like, sacred desire to act, be active in our lives and be empowered and, like, do the things that we want to do gets sort of twisted or mis appropriated into ambitions that aren't really speaking to us on a deep level, but when we can sync them up with the visions that we have had by candlelight or in the dark forest or as we're communicating with our dead or out on a winter hike, whatever it is, if we can act from those visions.
It's really different and for myself and the people that I support through big transition processes, the work that happens from that place is a lot more sustainable and also just easier. Like, just in terms of, you know, the support they need shows up when they need it and it's sort of a synchronistic, um, process.
magical process, rather than feeling like they're at the grind, you know, day in and day out, trying to make something happen. I really want things to feel a little bit more fluid for many of us this year, and to feel like we're so tuned in to how life is flowing already, not resisting it, that we can sort of be swept up into lovely things and real healing and new visions for our world and new opportunities to experiment with other ways to be and to make a life inside of collapse and capitalism and conflict and whatever is going on around you.
So to support you in this sort of dance between Um, the earth and the sea with the seagoat or water and solidity. I want to share some thoughts about bones and blood. Like I said earlier, Capricorn rules the skeletal system and I learned recently that, I don't think I knew this, that bones make blood.
Small capillaries enter into the openings in the bone, which is largely hollow in the middle, and inside that hollow space is what's called marrow. And this fatty substance is where stem cells are created, which are cells in the body that can become whatever. is needed. These stem cells can become many different types of cells in the body.
Red blood cells, white blood cells, other cells that can serve to repair parts of the body. So your bones, which we often think of as like inert, solid things, and they are hopefully solid and support our structure, are actually producing life giving fluidity. Something is flowing from them. So here we are again in between the solidity of the earth and being low to the ground.
But also being very close to the fluidity of water, bones, and blood. Both are necessary. The bones create the potential, the essential nature of the cell. They give us the structure, the support, the solidity that we need. And then the body's intelligence will show that cell what to become. It will know what to do with that flow, with that blood.
So if there is an area of your life that feels inert or. impenetrable, or immovable, or just completely solid, or stuck, or frozen. I encourage you to just stay open to the idea that it can change, that there actually could be flow inside of it, or flow that comes out of it, that it will change, because the seasons are changing, and nothing stays the same.
To believe that it It could die and be reborn and sometimes tending to the things around it in an indirect way is the best approach. This is something I talk about with people all the time who are in the midst of job transitions. Um, that you can take an indirect approach where you're prioritizing your health, maybe your physical space, you're making sure you're getting a lot of time with good friends or loved ones, you're out in nature enough, that those indirect choices also have a very direct impact on your transition with work, or whatever it is that you're working on.
That, that can be super, super helpful, more so than just staying at the desk, doing the solid thing and executing in your very earth way, which is so beautiful. Um, but sometimes we do need the indirect. approach where we're supporting the structures, um, the earth of our lives, the soil of our lives, but not necessarily directly, you know, um, cajoling that seed to open or to start growing before it's really ready.
So we can trust that if we support the structures of our lives, that we will know what to do. We, our body has intelligence. We will know what to do with what's created through those structures. It's like sticking with a practice for long enough to see how it begins to change our chemistry, or our neurology, or our spirit.
And, Finding the depths and the mystery inside of a consistent practice like that. So I really hope that you will explore your depths and the in between states right now. I hope that you will get outside even in the cold and notice what you see the rest of the natural world doing. I hope that you will go dark.
I hope that you will keep your desires private for as long as it feels good. feels sort of juicy and interesting to you until you feel them sort of ripen. I hope that if it's available to you, you could take yourself on a winter retreat. I hope you will sit by candlelight. I hope you will do whatever you feel.
Your deepest, most psychic, most spiritual self needs right now, and that's a continuum for everyone. If you're sitting here thinking like, you know, Christ, I don't have a spiritual practice. I don't feel, I don't know what Megan is talking about. I encourage you to just go to where it makes sense for you.
Maybe it's like journaling for five minutes a day or listening to some music that sort of helps you tap in. Um, it's just an invitation to get. Outside of the sort of execution mode and consider some more indirect ways to really nurture yourself and also to just create some real fecundity in your inner soil and the soil of you and your being in this precious body that you inhabit right now.
So. I hope that you have a really beautiful January, whatever comes for you, and I encourage you to just take a deep breath and envision yourself in our warm cabin again. We're ready to venture back out into the snow and receive the wisdom of the winter season. Time continues to move through this sacred spiral.
I will be taking some time away, taking a dose of my own medicine here, and will be going dark until January 22nd, so I think I will publish the first episode of the next podcast season shortly after that, but, you know, we'll have to see what the dream time shows me, so I'll keep you updated for sure, but if you would like to support the show, again, you can do that at buymeacoffee.com slash Megan Leatherman. Your financial contributions or your shares are so appreciated. And I want to say many, many winter solstice blessings to you. I hope you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.