The Hard Work of Blood Month
Whether it's letting things go like leaves falling from a tree or taking a sharp knife and making a kill, Autumn asks each of us to dance with Death. Among long-ago Anglo Saxons, November was called "Blood Month" or "Month of Sacrifice." In this episode, we explore different strategies for surrendering and/or slaughtering that which we cannot take into the Winter.
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Resources mentioned:
*Needing More: a 4-week Pilgrimage into Darkness: https://mailchi.mp/awildnewwork/gd63pkceqy
*The "Living the Seasons" Winter Journal: https://books.by/megan-leatherman/living-the-seasons
*Meant for More Small Group: https://awildnewwork.com/guidance
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 to the show. Welcome if this is your first time tuning in, or if you've been a listener for a long time, I'm so grateful for your presence today. We are in the very heart of Autumn now, and in a couple of weeks we will start to feel more and more of that shift from autumn to winter.
And this time is… It's kind of the beginning of the hardest part in the cycle of the year, and hardest not in like that. It's gonna be so miserable, but in the most kind of severe or paired down period in the cycle, it can also absolutely be the most freeing point, the most refining, the most life-giving in the midst of all of the death that is occurring at this time.
And today we're gonna talk about one of the hardest parts of being an adult who lives in alignment with the seasonal cycles, or who lives in alignment with their own kind of soulful development. Rhythms and that is learning how to let go or cut away that which is dead or is alive but needs to die.
This is difficult, gnarly work, but it's absolutely a necessary part in every cycle of every living thing. Not just living, you know, animals or plants, but in the life of relationships, projects, dreams, habits. It's always this cycle of life, death, and rebirth. And today we're gonna talk about the dying part of that process.
And there are a lot of really difficult choices that we are asked to make in our lives or forced to make. And there's a broad, broad spectrum of this. There are impossible choices that no one should have to make between life or death. There are choices around, you know, will I choose to pay for healthcare this month or pay for groceries?
We have to make hard choices around friendships or romantic partnerships or work relationships, projects that we gave life to that might come to an end. Um, a simple thing of just like plans changing. So there's this vast spectrum of choice and life, death and rebirth that we are in and constantly dancing through.
And my hope is that this episode comes in with some truth and clarity that helps meet you and support you wherever you are on that spectrum. Whatever choices are in front of you right now. One true thing that I wanna say at the very beginning is that there are no quick answers here, and there's no avoiding the pain or the death that is a part of living and being an adult.
The only way out is through, in this case and on the other side of whatever you allow to die or cut away. On the other side of that, there could be this. Deeper profound trust in yourself and in life. There is the chance for greater integrity with yourself and deeper authenticity. So I don't have like a five step process to just easily snip, snip away and anything that's not working for you in your life.
But I do know that it can be a lot more easeful and graceful than we might be used to. And, uh, we also just cannot avoid this process. Either we do it proactively or life will come in and do it for us. And so we get to choose if we would like to engage in this process with eyes wide open and courage in our hearts, or if we want to avoid it or, or disengage.
And I don't say that with any judgment, but I hope this episode helps give you a boost of confidence in your own ability to make decisions that are difficult, but ultimately life giving.
Before we dive in, I wanna share a couple of announcements of work that I'm doing this fall and winter that can support you in the decision making choices, living with consequences journey that we're all in right now.
The first is the Needing More Darkness practice that starts on November 30th. This is a free annual program that I offer. It's very simple, not easy, but simple and profound. So all it is is four Sundays in a row of turning off electric lighting and being with the darkness being in candlelight. And this happens at this point in the cycle of the year because it's a way to align with the darkest point in the year, and also the darkness can be so, so nourishing on its own. Being inside of the darkness gives your body a much different experience. Your sort of the chemicals in your own being can shift. Your nervous system will shift in the darkness. We can sense things. There's a spaciousness where we can understand things that we may not have been able to sense when all the lights were on.
It can also be immensely soothing after we do make a difficult decision or let. Something go or cut something away. So I encourage you, if you are feeling like things are moving quickly and they're very brightly lit and you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed or maybe a lot overwhelmed, consider doing this practice either on your own or with us.
It doesn't have to be Sunday evenings either. All it is is that I'm gonna send you an email every Sunday morning with some ways to engage in this practice and encouragement for you to do it, and then you know, you'll get to do it and try it and see what you notice. This year I'm also offering a couple of extra things for members of Eagle Creek, which is the beautiful body of people who are helping make this work sustainable and supporting this podcast.
So those will be some extra things like a best practices guide. A guide to an outdoor darkness practice and some winter solstice ritual materials and help. So if you are not already a member of Eagle Creek, you could check that out as well. All of the links that you need are in the show notes, and you can also find the Needing More sign up at a wild new work.com right on the home page.
I also wanna let you know that the Winter Living the Seasons journal is ready. If you know that you want to track the seasonal cycles and your own wintry dissolution, and dreaming and reimagining, I encourage you to check out this journal if you haven't before.
But even if you have, it's sturdy enough that you can do it again. You're a different person than you were last winter in your responses to the weekly questions and reflection prompts will be different this time around, so I encourage you to check out the Winter Journal if you're interested in being close to the land at that time and allowing yourself to change in alignment with what the land is doing.
Finally, I wanna share that if you're getting the sense that something bigger in your vocational life is ready to fall away and be reimagined and be reborn, the next Meant for More vocational guidance, small group starts on February 4th. This is a small cohort of people who are moving through 11 sessions with me over about five months, where we essentially resource people so deeply that what is authentically ready to grow in their working life can do so, and it's a really unique process and it's beautiful and I'm honored to guide it. And if you would like to join us, you can learn more about that at a wild new work.com/guidance.
Alrighty. With that, I would like to take us into our opening invocation. So wherever you are, you can take a deep breath, get settled, and you're being maybe notice what's happening around you.
Find something beautiful to rest your eyes on.
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 nations, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. May this episode be one small stitch and the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into.
Well, I wanna set us up for this conversation by talking first about why this is the time of hard choices, the time of endings. We know that this is happening all across the land, so we see trees dropping leaves, other plants dying. We may see animals going into hibernation mode or no longer living and dying themselves before the winter.
It's kind of like everywhere you look right now, you're. Hopefully aware that things are coming to an end in lots of different shapes and forms. The spiders are laying their eggs and dying. Many of them, there are plants that will not grow again next year, but they have let their seeds go to ground, so.
Everyone is making choices right now. Choices that are in alignment with the greater seasonal cycle, with the song that is playing right now in the chorus that we're a part of. It's called Autumn. So our experience may look different than the beings that we see on the land. Mostly because of industrial agriculture that allows us to eat all kinds of food all throughout the year.
And because of, you know, electricity that keeps our lights going and, you know, capitalism has made it possible for us to sort of be divorced from the seasonal cycles and. Rhythms of life, death, and rebirth that are so natural. But we can still choose not to skip over this part of the process. Even if we are, you know, lights on till 11:00 PM we're eating oranges all throughout the autumn season.
Like it or not, choices will still have to be made at this time all throughout our lives. But even if we don't feel very in touch with the autumn season, I bet there are still going to be difficult choices and endings and death at your doorstep, and that is a gift, even though it can be painful. What we are invited to do at this time is to let go of or cut off anything that is no longer in alignment with who we authentically are. So all of the old growth in our lives that perhaps once was beautiful or served a purpose or maybe we didn't really like, but it just grew anyway, all of that that is no longer alive is ready to be composted and given back to the Earth.
And if you have listened to the podcast episode on the elements, um, from the summer season or if you've been in a class with me, then you know, we work with the five elements here. And what this is, is the process of nature, the upward growth of nature becoming. It's downward complimentary force of mineral.
Okay, so what has grown up is ready to come down back into the Earth to be repurposed. So if we will engage in this process, what's possible for us is a psychic lightness and clarity. Okay. People who are good at sensing when something is ready to die and they let it go, instead of grasping on for dear life for 10 more years, they don't have the same psychic weight, you know, that others of us do, who will not engage in this process or refuse to engage in it around a certain thing.
So there's a lightness and a. And agility that's possible here. When we do this work, it's also bringing us into greater integrity. Again, when we let go of or cut away what is no longer authentically ours, what is no longer in resonance with who we are, it makes more space for that which is in resonance with us and in our lives to grow come spring.
So if we will do this work in the autumn season. It makes space for us to be able to hear and understand what is meant for us this coming winter, so we will actually have more space and more ability to understand what in our lives needs to be. Reimagined what new dreams and new seeds do wanna sprout This coming cycle and an actual real meaningful rebirth in our lives in the spring becomes a lot more possible.
So if you want anything in your life to change. The process of dying, letting it die is what you're invited to do now, and that is how change can come. I don't know exactly when, but I know that this is a part of the process and we don't have to know what is gonna grow in its place. That's a place where I think a lot of us get stuck, where we don't wanna let go of something because we don't know what else is gonna grow in its place, or we're afraid.
Nothing will, you know, oh, this is the best I can do. It's killing me, but it's all I've got, so I'm gonna hold onto it because I don't know what else could come. Autumn is risky. It's asking us to take risks. It's asking us to let go of that thing, allow it to die or kill it ourselves and trust. Something really can grow and it's often something that is more interesting and more in alignment than what would've been possible if we had hung onto this dead thing for another three months, or three years, or 30 years.
So now is the time to get serious about what it is in your life that is ready to die. All energy in an ecosystem gets reused. Everything you let go of in your life becomes compost for the soil of your life. It enriches you and it makes it more possible for new things to grow. And when we do this.
Collectively, imagine how nourished our soil could become, how many new seeds and sprouts could make a home inside of this fertile soil and could actually grow. So this is really, really important. Sacred work. So I wanna talk first about some skills for making hard decisions. Um, some things that seem really essential and that have helped me a lot in my own journey with having to make a kill or allow something in my life to die.
The first skill is tracking, and we talked about this again in the summer series, and it's where I always start in the Meant for More process because it's so foundational to being able to like live and navigate in your life. So it's really important as adults that we know how to track energy, that we know how to track our own life force. Where is my life force going? Is it spilling out into every which way am I channeling it into the places I want it to go? And also tracking the energy of that which we're in relationship with. Does this relationship feel alive? Am I having to put way more energy into it right now? And does that work for me?
Tracking the energy of our vocational lives. You know, is this again, the work and service that I want to be offering to the world? What are the signs I'm getting about what's resonating or not resonating? This takes some self-awareness and the space to be able to notice what's going on. It doesn't require that you be a narcissist and just focused on your own experience all the time, but it does take some, again, quiet and spaciousness to be able to sense your own life and vitality and what you're in relationship with.
You are the only one who will know what is ready to die in your life. And when we could both be looking at the same situation, like maybe you run your own business, we could both be looking at it and I could say, oh my gosh, you look like you're, you know, this business is thriving. Look at everyone resonating with the work that you're doing.
You're getting all of these new signups, et cetera. If in your body you know that this is only alive because you're pouring all of your vitality into it and not getting any life in return, you might be getting paid, but that's not life. If you sense that in your body. Then you are the authority, then the thing just is dying or it needs to die, or it needs to be given the chance to hibernate and be reborn in the spring.
So if we don't know how to track our own life force and get a sense of what the ecosystem of our lives is doing and where things are growing and doing okay, and where things are dying, this work is gonna be really difficult, more difficult than it needs to be. So it's hard to track what needs to change in our lives if we are busy every moment of the day, we have no time or space for self-reflection.
So if that's where you're at right now, then you may want to consider how to make a little bit of space to understand and look at what in your life is trying to fall away. And it may be the busyness in and of itself, that habit of overdoing that could be. Creating enough friction that you know it's ready to fall away, and I'll talk more about what that could look like in a minute.
So tracking is the first foundational skill. If you're wondering how to sense what needs to die in your life and follow through with it, you'll need to know how to track your energy and the energy of what you're in relationship to. The second one is divination or some other method for intuiting what is right for you on a soulful level?
So the mind, when we approach a difficult choice, the mind gets so loud. It's so loud with its worst case scenarios. It's black and white thinking, oh my God, if you choose this, here are the 10,000 things that are gonna happen that are scary. You can never leave. You could never cut that away because look at all of this.
That could happen. So we need another skill by which to understand and get sort of beneath the mind's loudness to hear our own. Soul or heart or intuition, whatever word fits for you, hear that quiet voice that says, this is what you have to do. You can't do this anymore, or if you want to move toward this, this has to fall away.
And the soul will tell us that in simple, clear language, it won't have the same emotional charge and whipping up story that the mind will create. But we have to be able to hear that. And I hear it through meditation or quiet moments, people receive dreams Again, I think divination, like we covered in episode 1 58 is a really helpful tool where you're using something like tarot cards or a pendulum or divining out on the land and asking for messages to show you what is right for you at this time, even if it doesn't make sense to the mind.
Or make sense on paper or make sense to anyone else. The third skill that is really helpful in this process is ritual, and we haven't really talked about ritual in depth in the podcast, but I've talked about it in lots of other places in my work, and I don't wanna make it over complicated here, but ritual, which is just.
An intentional container you create to process something. In ritual, we ensure that what we're cutting away actually gets composted instead of cutting away, and then it's not done ritually, and then it's much more easy to get back into the same dynamic. Like I've, okay, I've cut this. Away, but then I'm calling this person again and again and I'm like, reigniting that connection that I intended to end or I have let this fall away, but I have no container in which to process my grief.
So the grief lives in my body and gets, you know, metastasized. So in order for these patterns to really change, we need something like ritual where we are intentionally aware of what we're letting die and we're. Naming it. We're processing it, we're grieving, and we're giving it a, a container in which it can really be composted.
And again, it can be really simple. A 30 minute I'm stepping into this, I'm processing, I'm burning something away. I'm letting the river take it. I'm bury it in the ground. I'm calling in the new thing that I desire, the new way I want to be, and then I'm ending the ritual intentionally and moving on different.
So ritual is really helpful and I encourage you to put ritual around your death and dying process this autumn. The fourth one is courage. So, uh. What we're gonna be talking about today is really hard, scary work. It is really hard to kill something that is technically alive or thriving. It is really scary to end relationships and jobs and ways of being and identities.
It is hard, but with time. Our courage can grow because we will do it this cycle, and then when the next autumn cycle comes around, we will have a somatic memory of being able to do this and still live. We will see that we didn't actually die, that things were okay, that it actually fed us for the winter and spring.
So this is not easy work. There's no easy way through it. There could be grace for sure. Um, but it does take a lot of courage and whatever helps you to foster that courage. Whether it's reaching out to others and asking for help or being seen inside of it, or prayers or ritual or finding a. An ally on the land, a being who could help you and, and you can take up some of their courage.
Those are all ways that you can give yourself a boost that you might need in order to see this work through. And since I mentioned beings on the land, I encourage you right now to spend time looking outside and watching the beings who are. Doing this work right now. Let them show you how to let something go, how to drop your leaves, let them show you how to die, how to be reborn, how to cut away what's no longer useful, let them show you what to do.
In the aftermath of that, what now? I've dropped all of the leaves that had to go, and I'm bare and I'm exposed, and I feel vulnerable. Show me what to do, how to be with this. Let them give you some of their courage, their acceptance, their wisdom. The land is our greatest teacher in this work. So now I wanna get into talking about two different ways that we make hard choices in this autumn season.
The first one is through a process of letting go where something is like ready to fall away, and our work is letting go. And the second one I'll talk about is the process of cutting away. So maybe the thing isn't ready to fall off, we have to literally cut it off. But let's talk first about letting go.
So this is when there's something in your life where if you just stop feeding it your energy, it will fall away. This is like the deciduous trees right now who are no longer sending. Energy to their leaves. Because the leaves time has come, the leaves are no longer able to absorb as much sunlight.
They're dying. The tree knows that if they hold onto all of their leaves through the winter, the water in them will freeze. They will drop too late and they will not have the resources to grow new leaves in the spring. The trees don't hire an arborist to come and cut off all their branches and cut off all of the leaves.
All they do is they shift their energy to, instead of sending food up into the leaves, they send it down into their roots, and then the wind comes, gravity comes and pushes that. Those leaves down, mineral comes and takes them down to the ground. So there are times in our lives where if we would just stop feeding something, stop reaching out, stop trying.
It will fall away. It's ready to fall away. It's. Absolutely time it's appropriate for it to gracefully fall to the ground and feed the soil. It could be a matter of like no longer reaching out to that client that never responds in a timely manner or not. Trying so hard in a friendship and seeing what happens if you stop reaching out, not putting so much effort into that committee that you're on and, oh look, it just dries up on its own.
We don't even have to have a whole big ceremony. It's just gonna fall away. So there's this phenomenon where something on the other end of our lives, on the other ends of us is either out of life itself, it has no vitality of its own, or it is relying on our life to sustain itself, where like it has no inherent vitality anymore at this time.
In that case, it is our responsibility as adults to see that, recognize it, accept that that's happening, and shift our life force accordingly. Do you really want to keep all of these leaves on your tree, this autumn and winter? Do you wanna send all of your resources up into the crown so that you don't have to be vulnerable?
Or do you want to give yourself a break and pull your energy back into your roots so that something new? And surprising can bloom in the spring. I also wanna talk a little bit about the difference between something going into dormancy versus like a final letting go. So the leaves that the deciduous trees are dropping right now, that is truly the end of their life.
Those leaves will never be leaves again. They're going to transform into something else. There are other times where we can sense that something has a lot less vitality, but we're not sure it's totally dead. Like again, if we've agreed to a certain collaboration or if we have something in our work that used to be really alive, but it feels like it's waning and we're not really sure if.
Would just fall away, or if it's just a matter of timing or maybe it needs, you know, a long sleep, it's okay to place it into dormancy for a few months to put it in a cave, to put it to bed, tuck it in and say, I'll check on you. You know when spring begins. Again, what matters here is just honesty and.
Making an honest choice and not just a habit of avoidance. So if in your body you know that this is actually the end of something, then I encourage you to name that and let it fully go to be transformed. But if you're not sure, it's okay to say. I don't know if this is really the end. But I'd like to not put my energy here for a couple of months and see what happens.
Maybe it will come to life in a really new way. Maybe you end that collaboration or that relationship, or you say, you know, I just need to put this to bed for a couple of months and we'll see. And maybe it grows really beautifully in surprising ways in the spring. And maybe it won't, maybe it really was the end and you'll know that.
So I encourage you to keep dormancy or hibernation as an option in your toolkit because again, the mind gets so loud about like it's either this or that and like you gotta go nuclear, cut it all away. Um, and sometimes we need that. Push and we're holding onto way too much. But other times it's okay to be kind of slow and gentle and curious and put something to bed for a little bit and see what happens.
So the work in the Letting Go process is really just about changing the flow of your energy for long enough that something can fall away on its own. Again, you have to be discerning and clear here. So if you begin to shift your energy and you say, okay, I'm gonna stop tending to that project. I'm gonna let go of those plans I had, I'm gonna stop reaching out to this person.
Then it's your work to stick to that. And to not reach out because you're feeling guilty or you know, it's okay. Of course we all have patterns of self-sabotage, but the work is in like sustaining that shift in like the change of your flow and the way that your energy is going so that you can see the thing fall away or be taken by the wind, by the gravity, the natural forces of life that will take what is dead.
Again, that can happen as gracefully as the leaves falling away. It can be beautiful, even look how beautiful the autumn landscape is. It doesn't have to be quite so gruesome. Things get gruesome and challenging when we are holding on really, really tightly to something that is dead, that is trying to fall away, and we're saying no.
So the grace comes when we accept. That there's death here, that letting go is a natural part of life. And we, uh, are willing to dance with that and allow what's dead to go. And again, you don't have to know what's gonna grow in its place. That's not your business right now. What you're doing here is reconsolidating your energy and moving it away from anything that's taking too much or that's unsustainable, or that doesn't need your energy anymore, that's trying to die, and you're doing that so that you can resource yourself for the seasons to come in the future.
And you can do this without telling anyone you're doing it. You don't have to make a huge announcement. I'm shifting my energy away from this relationship. Of course, if someone is asking you why you're falling off. Depending on your relationship, absolutely. You can talk to them about that and you should.
But it is okay to do some of this work secretly and to do it on an energetic level first and then see what materializes. So if you know that you want out of an obligation or you want to end something because it's totally lifeless, it's taking all of your energy, you can absolutely start with a ritual to put it down into the ground.
To let it go. You can ask your wise and well ancestors or the land for help letting it go. You can call in what you want instead, how you wanna feel, how you want this to fall away from your life. And I encourage you to be really precise in your language. We're in the season of Mineral, which is the stones, metal, sharpness, gravity.
We wanna be really clear with our words about what. Is falling away. And how so in your ritual, you can say, and I encourage you to do this. I would like this to fall away with minimal effort from me with zero consequences to my safety or financial wellbeing, or whatever you wanna say. Um, and like, declare how you want this to fall away and do your ritual, and then wait and see what happens.
It may actually fall away on its own because it's not getting your energy anymore. It's possible you will still have to have a difficult conversation or officially quit something, but it hopefully will be a little bit easier because you have done the internal work first. That can make that more graceful where you've processed it yourself so that you're not coming to the meeting.
Full of unprocessed grief or self-doubt or questioning, you've put it into the ground and have had an experience of that. You have felt that in your body, and now you can talk to someone about it from a much more grounded place. Once you know to look out for what is ready to die, it can actually become a really, um, maybe not always enjoyable, but again, a really life-giving process where if you know that every autumn.
Things are gonna need to fall away, then you don't have to be in the emotional tumult of shock and surprise. You can expect it and you can proactively tend to what you're sensing is dead. So like for me, one small example is that this podcast will need to go dormant later in December. I know it's not.
Time for it to die. It's, there's still a lot of energy there, but the energy that it requires in order to continue living is energy that I need in my being. Now I need to pull back and restore myself after a busy season of teaching and, you know, doing all the things I do. I can't feed the podcast for a little while.
I need the podcast to go into hibernation mode and needless, and yes, of course I have fears about my business slowing down or listeners dropping off, and that will probably happen, but it, the dormancy is just a necessary part of the cycle. It has to happen. If I'm going to be able to speak what is really true, come the winter season and have the energy to do that, so.
I bet there are numerous examples in your life of things that need to fall away completely or that need to go into hibernation mode where you just can't send your energy to anymore. So letting go is this awareness that something we're in relationship to, or the relationship itself is withering and we make a conscious choice to stop feeding it either for a certain period of time or permanently.
And in doing that, it can fall away or it can go to sleep with more grace. Okay, so letting go is one strategy or one method, or one way that this can look in the autumn season. The second one I wanna talk about today is cutting things away, a more active approach. And some of you were probably in the class I taught on November 11th on Blood Month.
And Blood Month was an old Anglo-Saxon tradition. I don't think the Anglo-Saxons were the only ones who practiced this, but it's where we'll focus today. It was first documented in the seven hundreds or so by Christian clergy who were, you know, documenting pagan practices at the time to sort of denigrate them.
But, uh, it's the only. It's some of the only good evidence that we have about these practices and the word blood or the term blood month comes from the words blot, BLOT, and month, M-O-N-A-T-H, which was month. So Blot Monath was the name of this time, and blot is an old word that meant sacrifice. And it could also be spelled BLOD, which would've been the word for blood. So that's where we get Blood Month, but Blood Month or the Month of Sacrifice.
These were the terms used for the month of November, and it was because in this period people would practice a certain ritual, but also just a method of animal husbandry where the animals that were grown throughout the spring and summer, some of them would be kept alive through the winter to breed and give life to new animals in the spring, but many of them would be put to death and slaughtered in this time in order to become food for the villagers.
And so this was like a very practical thing, but it also was a pagan ritual. And those animals, many of them were offered and sacrificed to the gods. So what we know about it is that it happened in November because this is, again, November is like the beginning of the hardest harshest point in the cycle of the year when food becomes less and less plentiful.
So these people who practiced Blood Month knew that there was not enough food on the land to support all of the animals growing. So rather than everyone starving through the winter trying to keep lots of animals alive with limited grass and food, they, many of them would need to be put to death. And this wasn't done in a haphazard, industrial farming kind of way. This was done in a ritualized fashion where there would be at least two witnesses there. The animal would be slaughtered again, with respect and dignity. It would be a clean kill. Some of those animals and their blood would be offered in, in a way that honored the gods and everything from every animal would be used.
Nothing would go to waste. So these people who practiced blood month, you know, they chose to raise those animals for the purpose of slaughter. And we may have things in our lives that we grew knowing that we didn't really have capacity to keep them alive for long. But that still doesn't make these decisions easier no matter what, whether we knew that these things we've grown would need to die.
We're in blood month and we're shocked and disheartened that we don't have the capacity to keep this alive anymore no matter what. There are times in our lives when what has to die is fully alive. There's no good quote, unquote, logical reason to kill it or cut it away, but we just know we have to. The people who practiced blood month knew that not every animal could come into the winter and spring.
They knew that it was a choice between a slow, cold starving death or a dignified death in which the animal became a source of food and life for the village. And I understand, you know, this is like. Could feel problematic if you don't really buy into agriculture or the domestication of animals. But I wanna keep going and use it as a sort of teaching tool because I think it's really rich.
Many people that I talk to about vocation and work especially are waiting for someone else to come in and make a kill for them. They want the job or the old dead way of being in work or the old dead ways that they relate to an income. They want it to fall away. Gracefully. They want someone else to decide and cut it out and they want it to go away.
But not every death is like that. There are times when we have to do it ourselves and being an adult is sensing when something is falling away, and it's just a matter of changing our energy and when we have to grab the knife and make a really hard choice, and it's really normal to only think about the risks of cutting this away. What is gonna happen if I kill this animal? Will it be enough food? What if I don't have enough for the winter? What if it was a wasted kill? What if I chose the wrong things to keep alive? Come spring and new life isn't born? What if I don't have the skills to make use of everything that this animal is giving me, what if I waste this?
All of the things that come to life when we're approaching a, a hard choice like this, we often can only see the risks of cutting it away, all that we will lose, all of the reasons why it could be foolish or too risky, et cetera. But what is the risk of keeping it alive?
What is the risk of keeping something alive that I know I cannot feed through the winter? That is also a really fruitful place to look. What are the risks of me staying in this job? Another year or whatever it is. What is the risk of me staying in this place or holding onto this relationship for longer than I can really keep it alive?
And there are all sorts of ways that this could look. Maybe this year you have been doing a ton of learning, like you're growing in all of these different skill sets, or you've taken all of these classes and now you know that you need to end that for a time because. You're tired and you can't keep feeding it, and you need to eat and digest what is here, what you've done.
Maybe you are being asked to cut away certain aspects of your business or your work that are technically working, but that need to go away, need to die so that you can have the space to eat slowly, to be fed this winter to dream into something new in a few months. It could be a matter of like clearing physical space, like selling off certain things and letting the money from that feed you or passing those things on so that you can feed others.
It might be ending projects and client. Projects or ending offerings and referring things out to feed others. Killing that good enough job by putting in your notice and cashing in your PTO, being fed by the work that you've put in. There's lots and lots of different ways that this can look, and we often know that it's something that needs to be cut away because it's not falling away on its own and it's causing us a lot of distress.
And one thing that we can do that's very simple is to imagine cutting it away. Killing it. It's over. I've ended it. And seeing what you feel in your body, and again, this takes a lot of discernment because you might just feel panic, but we're trying to look a couple layers beneath the panic. Is it a feeling of rightness or relief?
If so, then it's worth continuing to explore what it might look like to cut it away. What is possible if the whole thing can't be slaughtered? Are there other aspects of it that could help me, again, reclaim some energy and be fed this winter? Once we know what has to be slaughtered in our lives, then then what needs to happen is to make a clean kill.
It is really common to make messy, undignified kills where we know something has to end, but we draw it out or we commit to all these things that we don't really mean, or we're being confusing. We're going back and forth. We're being sneaky or we're avoiding the hard thing. And that is not a kind way to end something or slaughter something.
So we have in this Blood Month tradition, a different way of doing it. Making a clean kill can look like a witnessed ritualized choice to end something where we, again, we make it a ritual, either ourselves or we make our difficult conversation into a ritual. Maybe we light a candle or we hold a stone, we hold mineral in our hands while we do it.
Uh, we maybe go to the land later and grieve and put it down and do ritual in that way. We may want to have friends or beloveds come witness our choice to end something, and we can do it in a way that where we offer this up to the highest good of all, where even if it seems like a small thing that we're cutting away.
The energy that you are allowing to be transformed and given back to the soil can be offered up again to the highest good of all, or offered up to honor the gods or the divine, whomever you believe in. So it's a matter of like taking it seriously and honoring this for the difficult thing that it is. So I encourage you not to gloss over this or to belittle what you're doing.
If you have to cut something away, make it a ritual. Ask people to witness it, see it yourself. Accept that this is hard, that you're doing something really challenging, grieve the grief that you need to grieve. You don't have to cover yourself in ashes and wail, you know, throughout the city, although you could, but just honoring the grief that does come up.
I find that it's easier on the other side of an ending…It’s easier to accept it and move on in a new pattern if we have ritualized and put intention behind the ending. If I have really grieved something, if I've done it in a ritualized way, if I have felt my feelings, if I have appreciated my difficult choice, it's easier on the other side. The clean kill has actually happened.
I find that it gets trickier if I've sort of drawn it out or I've like belittled it and like, oh, that's not such a big deal. I'm not gonna do any kind of acknowledgement around that. It's like the tendrils are still in me and it's harder to stay in the new pattern, in the new space on the other side of it.
So we wanna witness and ritualize and feel the grief that comes up in the midst of the clean kill. That's how we make it clean. We also wanna use precise, sharp language and clear intentions. Again, we're in mineral season, so imagine you have a knife, you want your knife to be sharp, you want to have a clarity of purpose in what you're doing.
Being clear in yourself first about what you can and can't do, how this is ending, how you want it to end, when it will end, and how and who needs to be involved and what you wanna share with them. Not coming in with like a ton of. Apologies and vague language where people don't really understand what you're saying or they leave and they're not really sure if this is really the end.
Being as clear in yourself as you can be and using precise language and intention. There's a fine line here where we wanna be sharp, but we don't need to be unkind. And there's this like trend around boundaries that I think is actually just being unkind, where it's this whole thing of like, you know, no is a complete sentence.
You don't have to explain anything to anyone. And there are very few cases in our lives where that's actually true, where you can just say no, or this is over and I'm leaving and offer no explanation. I think that's only appropriate if you have tried to end something and someone is just really not getting it or really not respecting the line that you have drawn, but in general.
It is possible to be clear and precise in yourself without being a dick about it. You can absolutely explain to people why you've made this decision. You can absolutely apologize for any. You know, inconvenience or pain that this is causing for them. It doesn't mean you're gonna change your decision or like, you know, pull the knife out and like the animal is half dead and wailing.
We're gonna make the clean kill. It's really over, but we can still be kind in that. It's okay if there is pain there will be for you, for other people involved. That doesn't mean it's the wrong decision. We have to sort of be with that, be with that reality. I can't really imagine being witness to the slaughter of a cow.
I've never done that. I don't wish to do that. I imagine it being really challenging, but I would, I aspire to be the kind of person who could be with that and be present to that and witness that and be part of a dignified death for them. So we make the kill, but we can be kind inside of that. And then we sit with what has happened and we make use of what has been killed.
Something about what is cut away will nourish you in the coming months and make new life more possible. In the spring, you may not be able to see that now. You may not understand what's gonna grow in its place or what will happen, and that is okay. It is still necessary sometimes to do this cutting away, and sometimes we know.
Why and what's gonna happen, and it's easier than we think, and sometimes it's really fucking gnarly. And really hard on the other side, and that's why we have the winter. I went through this last autumn season where I was sort of shocked to find that a really big, meaningful relationship in my life that had grown had to be killed and cut away and.
That was a really hard decision, but I harnessed what I could in precision and clarity, and I cut it away and I grieved. I spent all autumn and winter trying to make sense of what had happened. Why did that have to die? Did I do it in the right way? Who am I now? On the other side of it, what do I do with this huge carcass?
How can I be fed? What needs to be given to the earth? What's meant for me? What just needs to fall away? And in hindsight, what I can see now is I can see the incredible amount of richness and new life that that death brought me. It gave me a deeper sense of sturdiness in myself and deeper connection to the web of life.
It helped me understand what I'm meant to share and teach right now and how I wanna do that. So it was very, very painful in the process, and I wouldn't have said that this was great or you know. That I, I wouldn't have chosen it probably, but sometimes life chooses that for us, and I'm grateful that that happened.
So if you're in the midst of something really painful like this, or if you're, you've been avoiding it, but you know it's coming. I just wanna say that there is something really precious on the other side and. To give yourself a chance to really integrate that and make use of it in the winter, and we'll talk more about that when the time is right, but we're still in the process of the actual slaughter.
That's where we're at in terms of the seasonal cycles. So we've talked about letting go the, making the choice to stop letting our energy flow into or feed a thing, and being with that, we've talked about making the choice to cut something off, kill it, but there are times when it's not our choice.
Sometimes life or fate will come and end something for you. End plans. End opportunities, even end the life of someone. And then we're sitting there and it wasn't our choice and we're left with our work. Our part of grieving it, trying to maybe not make sense of it, but allowing it to feed the soil of us.
Maybe there are open wounds where a cord was ripped out, we had a connection to something and someone else ripped it out, and we're grieving and there's an opening there and that needs healing. We might find ourselves on the other side of something that has died and there's a new spaciousness that's very uncomfortable and different, or it's very quiet in a way that we didn't plan or desire or expect.
And even when we don't know why something or someone has died, it doesn't make sense to us. It's not what we would have chosen. Don't forget that the Earth accepts all death. The Earth uses everything. The soil will take it all and turn it into nutrition and food for someone or something else. So we may not understand why some things or why some people die, but if we can accept that it has happened.
Grieve, go down into the grief and not look away. Something inside of us knows how to integrate that and make new soil from it. Your body has that intelligence, just like the Earth's body has it. So no matter what, if it's our choice or not, our choice or a mix, when we are on the other side of this, it is a quiet time.
We come into the winter and something sacred has died, that loss is sacred. That's why we grieve it. So we're there and we're on the other side. And then what? Then comes the work of giving ourselves the time and space to integrate it into our soil. That inward, quiet winter work of accepting it and being with all the fears that will come up as a result.
The fears that we made a mistake, I didn't do that right. Nothing's ever gonna grow again. I don't have enough to feed me for the rest of the winter. And the snow, the cold, the dark comes in like a blanket and it can help us to be still inside of that. To see the fears and be with them, but not consumed by them or to go deeper into the grief, if that's still our work to do.
You have the capacity to do this, and the land can support you and show you how to do this. Your wise and well ancestors know how to do this and can support you, and you have an innate intelligence. You have all the elements inside of you who can help you to go down into the grief, to let it go, to sit in the inward darkness of winter and to grow upward again when it's time in the spring.
I really hope something about this episode today felt true to you and soothing in a way just because it's honest. Even though I know this is not easy work. I wish you. Such courage and tenacity as you track what's ready to fall away or what needs to be slaughtered and see that work through. And I hope you come out the other side with a deeper sense of trust in yourself and in this work that we do.
Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed the episode or are a listener and would like to support the show, I welcome that support either through an Eagle Creek membership or if you can't commit monthly and you just wanna send a few dollars my way, you can do that at buy me a coffee.com/megan leatherman. You can learn about Eagle Creek at a wild new work.com/eagle-creek.
Of course, your sharing of the episode reviews on Apple and working the material into your life is so appreciated as well. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I love being in this relationship with you. I will be back with you in two weeks for the final episode of the autumn season of the show, and we will journey ever deeper into the dark and quiet of this season and see what medicine is needed in our lives at this time.
I hope you take such good care and I will see you on the other side.