The Seasons Are a Song
In this episode, we're updating the definition of what the seasons are so that we can live into their full, bright magic. I share some new (to me) ideas about the Earth's relationship to Fire, the seasons as a response, and the lyrical beauty of living seasonally.
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Resources mentioned:
*One on one vocational guidance: https://awildnewwork.com/guidance
*Order a "Living the Seasons" Autumn journal: https://books.by/megan-leatherman
*All my classes, events, and writing can be found at: awildnewwork.com
*Become a monthly supporter in Eagle Creek: awildnewwork.com/eagle-creek
Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to compost capitalism and the norms of dominant culture. And answer the soulful callings of these times we live in, which includes the call to deepen our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother, writer, teacher and guide. I live in the Pacific Northwest and I'm your host today.
Hi, friend and welcome. We are officially into the autumn season now here in the Northern hemisphere. The autumn equinox was on September 22nd, and so from here on out, the darkness will grow and take us deeper into itself and all of its teachings. We talk a lot on this show about the seasons and living seasonally, but I've never gone into that much depth about what that actually means. I've observed the seasons and have done my best to align with them for about eight to 10 years now, and I keep learning new things about what that means and how it can help us.
So what I share about what the seasons are and how we can work with them might surprise you or deepen your existing practice if you have one. And I hope that no matter what, you are just delighted to listen to this episode and that it gives you some fresh ideas about how to be a part of the landscape you live in rather than a passive observer, which is. Kind of the best that we can hope for in capitalist culture. We're sort of offered these two options.
You can either be a passive observer of the landscape, trying to cause as little harm as possible and just being sort of frozen. Or you can be part of the active destruction of the landscape. But the truth is that we are invited to be so much more than that to actually. Be the landscape, be a part of it, be the seasons, sing their songs.
Before I dive into what that might mean and look like, I wanna share a couple of quick announcements. The first is that I still have space for two, one-on-one clients this fall. People who are ready to make a meaningful transition in their working life. And, uh, if you feel like you need a. Robust, sturdy container that's based on nature and the seasons and is spiritual in its essence, I welcome you. To learn more about that, you can visit a wild new work.com/guidance. Composting capitalism starts October 1st. I know a lot of you have taken that class or have maybe thought about taking it, and like I said last time, something about the container is shifting. So this could be the last time I offer it in this way, but I think it's going to be absolutely beautiful. I love teaching it in the autumn season, and I hope you'll join us for more on the seasons and how to survive capitalism and how to live into your soulful calling at this time. You can check out the Living the Seasons Journal, my monthly seasonal classes, and more at a wild new work.com. Thank you so much to those of you who are part of Eagle Creek who are making this work available to all. I send a monthly behind the scene email to Eagle Creek members offer the monthly classes to them for free and more in exchange for their support. And so thank you to those who are there and if you'd like to join, you can learn more about that as well at awildnewwork.com.
Well, let's switch into our opening invocation, and I encourage you, wherever you are, to just do something nice for your body.
Just do something nice, like a big deep breath, or maybe shake something out, or let out a sigh or I don't know, whatever would feel good. And we'll come into some presence before we begin this episode. 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 Multnomah, Cowlitz, Bands of Chinook and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. May this episode be one small stitch in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into, and so it is.
Okay, well this episode is really a conversation about what the seasons are and how we can live into them, be part of them, and the seasons are an area where there is a lot of tired, stale. Language and it drives me crazy. I find myself doing it sometimes, and I hope this episode brings some new language, new words, new definitions that can help the seasons to feel as alive as they really are.
So, stale language around the seasons is annoying and a problem and also just keeps us separate from the real life changing magic of them, and it also makes it more likely that they will be co-opted for profit in this capitalist system. You know? What does it mean to have autumn? Well, it means. You should buy new sweaters and pumpkin spice lattes, and you need to buy, buy, buy.
And then in the winter, you're gonna need to buy a bunch of Christmas decorations or gifts for people. And then in the new year, you need to buy this new gym membership. And it's just constantly, the seasons are constantly co-opted for profit and made into a source of money for those. Trying to get us to consume even more.
So I hope that the seasonal conversation that we have today and throughout the autumn season and ongoing on this podcast, I hope it feels really alive to you. And I'm gonna share today what I think the seasons are at this moment. But that is a living. Breathing, not easily pinned down thing. So this is what I feel and know at this moment.
But next autumn, it could be different and that's very appropriate and correct. When we know what the seasons are, when we have a workable definition that we can. Really hold that feels true to us. It's much easier to live in alignment with them. And autumn is the season of the mineral element, the stones, the decaying matter, the sand, the crystals.
Everything that is not upwardly sort of growing mineral is the force of decay, decomposition, composting, old, old stones that have a much different sense of time. Mineral teaches us what is valuable and we don't know something's valuable if we can't define what it is. Mineral helps us to have healthy, updated.
Definitions that actually work, that are actually life giving definitions about ourselves, about how the world works, about anything and everything. So in this episode, we're going to redefine the seasons. We're gonna come into a. More precise definition that can help us, and Mineral is going to help us with that, and that will be an ongoing process throughout the autumn season.
So the seasons are a response to the Earth's journey around the Great Fire. It is a response to the light and temperature changes brought by our relationship to the sun. Fire as an element, as a force always elicits some kind of response or change. You can't be around a flame and not be changed. Either the room gets brighter or it gets dimmer.
It's warm. You get cooked in the fire. Fire has. A force of its own that causes change among anything or anyone around it. So the great fire at the center of our solar system necessitates change, elicits a response from the earth as we orbit around the sun. So the earth is orbiting around the sun and it does so at a tilt of 23.5 degrees.
So as it's orbiting that tilt changes. Depending on where it is in relationship to the sun. So when the earth's northern tip is tilted away from the sun, we have winter in the Northern hemisphere because the sun's rays can't reach as far, aren't as warm to that. Part of the planet that is tipped away from the sun.
When we have summer in the Northern hemisphere, it's because the planet's northern tip is tilted toward the sun. So the sun's beams are much stronger and strongly felt in the Northern Hemisphere. So right now. Right as we're in the midst of the autumn equinox, the tilt is in the midst of transitioning, so there's more sunlight equally dispersed across both hemispheres because the planet is sort of not tilted or facing the sun head on.
And so we have an equal amount of daylight and warmth across the hemispheres. After the equinox, now the earth will begin tipping away. The northern part will begin tipping away from the sun. So I hope that doesn't feel too confusing or overwhelming, but essentially what I hope you gather from that is that the season is externally triggered.
The season is happening because the Earth's beings are responding. To the way our relationship to fire is changing now we are away from the sun. It's not as warm anymore. It's getting darker, and the seasons are the response to that reality. So all of the beings on the earth are making choices. Now that their relationship to the sun is going to change, plants are slowing down their growth, they're giving their last gifts in the southern hemisphere, the light is growing, so plants will be increasing their growth, the days will be getting warmer.
So the seasons are a response to something outside of anyone's control. None of us, no being on this planet can control. The sun or the Earth's orbit around the sun. So every season that comes along, every time the sun's. Power on the earth changes as a result of where we are in our orbit and how we're tilted and what degree we're facing the earth at, we all have a chance to make choices, to make use of the sunlight and energy that is available and to pare down when we have to.
And the intensity of those shifts depend on where on the earth you are. So if you live closer to the equator. The Earth's journey around the sun might bring much less even imperceptible change. There may be wet seasons or drier seasons. There may be seasons based on storms over the oceans, or seasons based on the animals that migrate.
So it's not true that there are just four seasons. There are as many seasons as there are landscapes on the planet. Spring. Where I am is gonna look different than spring. At the North Pole or somewhere further south, or even somewhere at the same latitude, but at a higher elevation. So the planet can hold all of these realities, all of the seasons, all of these responses to our shifting relationship to the sun.
And this is a really beautiful thing because it's like all of us on this earth, no matter where we are, we're all sitting around the same fire. But we're sitting there differently. Some are higher up above, some are further down, some are farther away, some are closer. We're all around the same fire, but differently.
So the response to that shifting relationship to the fire is what we call the seasons, the changing colors of the plants, how many of them are blooming, the fungi that come, the birds that migrate. Those are all ways that we identify which season we're in. How is the earth responding? If there was no response, if nothing changed?
We wouldn't call it a season. Imagine if we said, oh, this is the autumn season now, but all of the cherry trees were in blossom, or there were daffodils and tulips everywhere and things were really growing. Would you believe me that this was the autumn season? No, because we identify the seasons based on the response that we are seeing among the land around us.
So the seasons are a chorus of response made up of many different melodies and harmonies, but with one overarching song in the spring, there's this upward lift of growth and renewal. Maybe it's a lot of flutes and bright notes that help us sort of feel that upward lift and dancing, wanting to dance around the Maypole.
In the autumn, there's this downward force. Maybe it's drums and low tones, or the tuba that takes us down. There is a song that's happening all across the planet in response to the shifting relationship to the Sun migration music. Bird song, the Music of Butterflies emerging from the chrysalis. The music of a bunny's paws on the snow.
It is a musical reality that drifts and undulates all across the planet. Here we are in the Song of the Autumn Season, the Song of Leaves Falling. Canadian Geese, migrating Bees, collecting the final Nectar, squirrels collecting as many nuts as they can, the trees, dropping those nuts. Plop plop on the ground.
The music of the rain that will come, the Song of Bear getting fat in the forest. The Song of Pumpkins rotting and cracking open the drums and the low tones of our ancestors around their fires calling to us when the veil gets thin. The music of the Cider Press, the candles being lit, our weeping as we give our grief back to the earth our own songs.
And thanks as we harvest and understand that we have done enough that the earth has done enough that we must make use of what's here and do our best to make it work through the winter. It is a beautiful haunting song, this autumn song. What it means to live seasonally is to turn toward that song. To listen to it, to lend our own voice to it.
In capitalist culture, we are stuck in these factories, forced to work and clang, clang, clang on the machines. We're hammering. The sounds are discordant. There is no song is just banging and deficiency. And one note, trying to drown out the sorrows and cries of all who are suffering inside of this machine.
But some of us, even as we clang away, can still hear the song outside and it's the most beautiful song, and every season we're drawn to it. We want to hear more. We wanna sing alongside everyone else, singing in that circle, making the season what it is, making that season strong. So living seasonally is intentionally tuning your ear to that song.
The song of the landscape where you are at this particular point in the Earth's journey around the fire and singing along as best you can. However you can, every choice you make can be incongruence with that song or out of tune with it. Just like the maple tree, changing colors in the fall strengthens the presence of the season.
It shows us that the autumn is here. Your choice to harvest what's available to you, to preserve what grew this summer, to let go of what needs to be composted in your life, to go to sleep earlier, to appreciate the darkness and so forth. All of that is adding to this beautiful. Music, and this is an intuitive, joyful process.
It's joining a drum circle. It's joining a choir. It's joining a caroling troupe. It can be that much fun, that meaningful, that natural. Song and singing has been coming up for me for almost a year now, and I feel like I'm getting banged over the head constantly with the message. That song is incredibly important.
Humans singing. The Earth singing your voice, my voice, adding to the music of this planet, the music of the seasons. I keep hearing stories about clients or students who are spontaneously feeling drawn to sing with the earth. I keep hearing about the land asking for humans to sing. I've been asked by the land.
To offer a song mug. Wart has asked me to sing to them. I've been noticing what changes in my nervous system when I sing, when my kids sing, my daughter longing for more songs, noticing what it does to human community. When we sing together. Our ancestors would have had songs for everything. Songs that literally expressed the medicine of the autumn.
Season songs that were a part of The Great Song of Autumn songs of harvesting songs for preserving songs for hunting songs for laying our dead to rest songs for grief, songs for joy, songs for sewing, songs for mending songs for medicine making. And so much of that has been lost now. And now we live in this culture that forgets songs, forgets the power of singing, who teaches us that we have to be these incredible singers, or we have to be pop stars in order to have the right to sing.
But we don't, our imperfect voices, our bad pitch, our missed words. It is all welcome. And I am learning that some things have to be sung, certain prayers, incantations, hopes, messages, cannot live in the spoken word. They need music to them. If this sounds weird to you, that is okay, but I bet there's a part of your ancient heart that is leaping at the idea of singing to the plants, to the forest, to the fungi who miss our dancing, to awaken them underground.
I bet there's a part of you that is jumping for joy at the idea of singing your ancestral songs, remembering them, letting them just come through you and out through your mouth. So when we talk about ways to live seasonally, a big one could just be to sing, to join the song, literally, to look up folk songs from your heritage, or just start singing whatever the it is that's on your heart.
You can join the song in other ways too, with changes that you make in your day-to-day life. When we stop fighting, what is happening, when we accept that the Earth's relationship to the sun is changing, that it's not going to be summer anymore, and when we join in with the great song that is happening with what the land around us is doing right now, we come in to ease.
Congruence instead of fighting what is here or pretending it's not happening. So the best way to live seasonally is to look at what the season is around you. What is the song being played right around you, where you are? And then mimicking that, mirroring that, bringing it into your own life, your own choices, putting something down, choosing to stop blooming.
Stop trying to be pretty or bright or open to give of your last fruits, your juiciest gifts to turn in early, to get up later, to put down the job or the work that's too heavy for you now to cry when it rains, to save the seeds of the plants around you, and write down the seeds of dreams that live in you now, but aren't ready to be planted.
To pluck the un ripened fruit that will never ripen now, and to feel your disappointment. To change your life because the Earth's rhythms are important to you to tune out as best you can, the metal clanging of the capitalist machine, and choose to live into the music of the seasons instead. To value those as just as important or more important than the clanging that you hear in all of these ways and all of the choices you make that feel good to you and natural and in alignment with what you're noticing about the land around you.
You become the song too. The autumn is literally strengthened by the choices you make that are incongruence with them. Just like if you were a plant that was choosing and allowing the natural changes that need to occur to occur, allowing yourself to dry out, to drop your seeds, to stop blooming. This isn't an intellectual exercise.
This is literally you becoming an expression of the autumn season, and this is a blessing to the land itself, but it's also a tremendous blessing to you. Seasonal living is a powerful antidote, if not the most powerful antidote to capitalist living and lifestyles because of what it takes us into. If we really lived into the medicine of each season, capitalism could not exist.
If every autumn, we were a culture that put things down that accepted the limits of what's grown, that was enough. That's enough profit for this year. That's enough harvest. We're gonna make it work. If we were a culture that felt our grief. Tended to our grief all year round, but especially in the autumn, we wouldn't be in the situations we're in if we were a culture that mimicked and mirrored and embodied the medicine of the winter season, accepting the cold, the rain, the snow.
Not complaining about it, but knowing that it was necessary and working with it. We would be a people who had new energy, new vitality, who were willing to take risks in the spring. Who really could grow into new things, new futures. In the summer, when we turn our head to the music of the seasons, the grip of that machine weakens.
We hear the song, we move toward it, and we can't fucking unhear it. We must sing. It's too beautiful to resist. It's too beautiful not to sing along once you've become a part of it. The other thing that I think is really beautiful about living the seasons is that it creates a very sustainable rhythm for a life.
Your being will know that there's time for everything that needs to happen. When you live in alignment with the seasons, if you surrendered to the rhythm of the landscape around you, your soul, your body would know that there is going to be time for harvesting, for letting go. Forgetting, quiet for drawing inward.
Your being will know that there will come a time, there will be time when you are meant to take risks, to try new things to grow, a lot, to collaborate, to bloom differently. There will be time to come into the fullness of yourself, to master something, to share abundantly, and then time again to let it all go.
Stop holding everything. When we don't live in this rhythm, we're trying to do everything all the time. Oh, we need to rest more. I'm not sleeping enough. I need to be doing more. I need to turn inward. I need to take risks. I need to bloom. Oh wait, I need to stop blooming. I don't have anything to give anymore.
So seasonal living is soothing. It is a soothing song. And it's very productive too. I know that in this culture we are way too obsessed with production and we are trying to create and make things and make profit and get bigger all year round, and that's harmful and I don't want that, but I do want sometimes that are very productive.
I wanna do a lot in my life. I wanna grow a lot. I have a. Very large appetite for growth and experience and really living, and I can do that when I am a part of the Song of the Seasons because I am renewing and harvesting and composting. And then in the bright spring and summer. I have a better chance of actually growing and coming into some fullness than I would if I was trying to grow all year round and frustrated and not giving myself the chance to come into the medicine of the dark months.
So living the seasons is soothing. It's a beautiful song. It's the most beautiful song you'll ever hear. It has so many intricacies. It's different everywhere we go on the planet. We could never learn all of the songs of the autumn. They're too varied and too different, but you carry some of them in your being and some of them will be alive on the land where you are right now in this season, and I hope you will learn those songs.
I hope you will lend your voice to them. I hope you will be deeply profoundly nourished and revitalized by them. Thank you for being here today. I hope you loved this episode. Next week I'm gonna share one more on the topic of how to compost capitalism, and then we'll shift into our every other week rhythm for the rest of the season.
So this is a little kind of. Uptempo time of three episodes in a row, and then we're gonna slow things down a little bit. I guess now would be a good time to share that. I'm also dreaming into some new music for this podcast, and I don't know exactly what that will look like, but it's been on my mind for a long time now, especially as this message of song and music has come to such importance in my life.
So if you are interested in supporting. Getting some new music for the show. One wonderful way would be for you to become an Eagle Creek member and support the show financially every month so that I could eventually pay afford to pay a musician to make new music for the show. Or if you're listening and you are a musician and you're open to a trade or collaboration or being paid for your work, and you have some thoughts about what kind of music could add new life to this podcast.
Please reach out to me and let me know if you're listening and you would like to go deeper into the Medicine of the Autumn season. The Living The Season's Journal is here to take you week by week through the season. The Meant For More Program is here if you're looking for some one-on-one support right now in your vocational or working life.
And of course, composting Capitalism begins on October 1st, and the links to everything will be in the show notes for you. Or you can go to a wild new work.com. Of course, thank you to all of the current Eagle Creek members for supporting this show financially, but also through your kind words and encouragement and being in a different kind of reciprocity with me.
I'm so grateful for that. I hope all of you take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.