Come Down into the Gracious, Quiet Winter
In this final episode of 2025, I share what's possible when we intentionally work with this part of the yearly cycle, what we're offered after Mineral season, and how to enter Winter with grace.
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Resources mentioned:
*The "Living the Seasons" Winter Journal: https://books.by/megan-leatherman/living-the-seasons
*"Winter at Work" book: https://awildnewwork.com/shop/winter-at-work
*Flowing with Fear Class on Jan. 22nd: https://awildnewwork.com/events/2026/flowing-with-fear
*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. 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 am coming to you on a dark, very rainy day. It's definitely feeling really, really close to winter, or like winter is already here, kind of mixing in with the autumn season. And even though I feel that so clearly with the land and the way that the rain is drawing us down, it has taken Herculean efforts to create quiet in my life right now. And I wonder if you're feeling that too, that winter is here and the end of Autumn is here and it's all mixing. And our bodies wanna get quiet, but it's not coming easily or without effort.
And if you're in that, if you're feeling like you want to rest or move more slowly, or you want the lights to be dimmer. You wanna live in candlelight for a little bit, but you're feeling like it's really hard to do that and to make that space for yourself. I just wanna affirm that that is a real thing and that I hope today's episode. It gives you some extra inspiration or something more to hold onto to, again, keep your knife out and cut away or let fall away anything that is distracting or overbearing, or. Unnecessary at this time so that you can come into the essentials, only the essentials of your own quiet and beingness, and rest and feel held by something greater than yourself. So today we're gonna talk about where we are in the cycle of the year and the cycle of personal and soulful growth.
We're gonna talk about what comes after mineral season, where have we been, what comes after we've made. A cut or let something fall away, and how can we be blessed by the winter to come? How can it actually set us up for something really hearty and beautiful and surprising in the growing cycles as the light will begin to grow after the winter solstice?
So I hope you'll find a cozy place in yourself, or literally get cozy with a blanket. And we will venture into this final episode of the autumn season of the show, this final episode of the year 2025. And I have some things to offer the resources to support you in your winter work and beyond. And I'll talk about that at the end.
Um, so for now, let's just find some. Breath, some ground, some spaciousness in ourselves as we move into our opening invocation. 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 in the great reweaving of right relationship that so many indigenous teachers are calling us into.
Okay, so I wanna take us on a little elemental journey through the cycle that we're in literally right now, and also the cycles that we move through in terms of how new things grow in our lives. And this year we started talking about the five elements on the show and in the classes that I teach. And in case you haven't heard the episode on the five Elements or you haven't been in a class with me, I'll just say that I work with the five elements, and I learned about this from a teacher who studied with the Dagara elder named Malidoma Patrice Some, and I've also studied the Daoist system of the five elements.
And there's a lot of overlap and a lot of beautiful synchronicities between those two systems. Although they are different and I am not. Of those systems or of that heritage. So I try to just stay really close to the ground with the elements and just study how they work and manifest on the land themselves.
But I just want you to know where I first learned about this system and where my understanding is rooted. So the five elements are earth, which is like the soil, the literal ground, and the earth is at the center of the Dagara medicine wheel. Then you have fire, which is, you know, the flame, uh, the sun, fire, heat, and all that it creates. Across from fire you have water, and water has all kinds of manifestations. The rain, there's salt water, fresh water. Every element is like a whole. World that you step into and is it like a force of life and part of life expressing itself. So that's fire, water, and earth. And then you have mineral, which is the force of decomposition.
It's the downward force of things decaying and dying. It's the falling leaves, it's the autumn season. And across from mineral, you have the nature element, which is the spring season, and the upward force of growth and all that is alive. So the animals, plants, and fungi. So that's a very simplistic explanation, and I wanna talk about three of these elements in more depth.
Today to give you a sense of where we are and where we're going so that you can find steadiness and comfort and real power in the upcoming winter. So since the autumn equinox, we have been inside of mineral season. We've been inside the fall, which is a period on the land. When death and decay and decomposition is very, very pronounced and we feel that in our own lives as well.
In the time between seasons, the earth element is at the fore. So we come down through mineral, we come down to the center of the circle, we come back into the ground, and there's this in between liminal period called Earth Days where we're sort of in the midst of both seasons at once, all of the elements come back into the center.
Between each season and the earth element offers us a chance to welcome the change that has occurred this autumn to welcome the changes that will occur to come back home into the present moment and into our bodies before we're stepping into the next elemental season. So this is an excellent time. To catch your breath, to reflect on where you have gone this autumn season and to sort of hit reset in any area of your life that you feel like you need it.
And then on the winter solstice, on December 21st, we will move into the season of water. Into the winter season, and that's a, has a very different feel to it than mineral season because again, it's like a whole different realm that we're stepping into. And I'll talk a lot about that in a moment. So we're going from mineral to earth to water.
We're going from the downward force of death and decay to a moment of pause. Into the, again, still liminal period where new life may not have made itself known yet, but something will begin to stir conception is possible. Some new dream can begin to make itself very softly known to us. So that is a cycle or a rhythm that makes a lot of sense to me.
That has been life giving to me that I see on the landscape where I live. But there are no absolutes in this work. The earth is never all or nothing. There are. Female bears right now who are pregnant, who will give birth in the winter. New life will come here and be born in the winter season. There are eagle chicks further south that will be born.
There are eagle parents making their nests right now. There are places, depending on how far south you are, where there is a lot. Blooming in the winter season and the summer is a more dormant period. So I encourage you, as always, I've written a whole journal series about this. I encourage you to pay attention to what the landscape around you is doing right now.
How are the elements manifesting around you? Is there a lot of death and decay? Is there a lot of water already? Is there. New life that's blooming. And how does that act as a mirror for you or a guide for you in terms of how you want to either participate in more death and decay and darkness, or are there things in your own life that are actually already blooming already to bloom?
So trusting your own rhythms and trusting the land right around you to guide you into. The way of being in your life that is most advantageous, and I really, really trust that. But I wanna share today the sort of overarching like big general themes or songs at play across the Northern Hemisphere at this time as the sunlight wanes and wanes and wanes and gets to its weakest point on the winter solstice.
So I wanna talk about mineral for just a minute, and we have talked about it a lot on the show so far. So I won't. Belabor these points, but I hope that you have gone down, down, down into something this season. I hope you have been sharp and precise with your choices. I hope you have made significant. Room in your life, whatever that looks like.
And there is still time to do this work. Mineral doesn't disappear after the autumn season. It's just not as pronounced. So there's always time to simplify or come back to the essentials, and there's still time to do this work when you're really supported in it between now and the winter solstice. So what else, if anything, what needs to fall away so that you can sleep and dream this winter?
In the autumn season, the land is falling asleep and what needs to happen in order for us to fall asleep. It's easier to fall asleep when you are nourished with good food, when the work that's been on your list or the work of your day is completed, when the lights are out, when it's dark, when you feel safe and supported, when you know that you're in a safe place where you have peace and that everything is as taken care of as it can be.
So what could that look like? Literally for you right now, but also merit, metaphorically, are you trying to fall asleep but are way too busy? There's too much on the to-do list. Can you finish your commitments or end them early? Can you make a plan to let go of as much as you can and fall asleep soon, even if you have to stay up a little later than you expected, even if you can't fall asleep by the solstice?
Most people in this culture will not give you permission to do this, and no one else can do it for you. You have to claim your right to fall asleep, to prepare for bed to rest with the resting land, and to go as far into that as your own circumstances will allow. This time in December is kind of like. We are about to get ready for bed.
We're like, okay, I know it's late. I need a good night of sleep. I'm gonna start turning the lights off. I'm doing my little routines. I'm gonna surrender to bed. I get my pajamas on, and then a bunch of people burst into your house. Singing jingle bells and demanding that you get gifts ready for a white elephant exchange, and you need to bake this wreath and then you need to bake this meal and we're hungry and isn't this fun?
This is what we do at this time of year. That's what happens in our culture right now. We are ready for bed and the activity levels around us are increasing in noise and speed. So part of our work as adults is deciding how much of that to participate in. I know it can be really fun and sweet and I'll be doing some of that too, but a big part of it, I think right now for some reason in 2025, is recalibrating our tolerance for that kind of behavior and coming into some different kind of balance.
Haven't you done enough this year? Haven't you had enough growth activity, busyness time in the light? It's enough. The plants know it's enough. It is time now for some clear open space. It is time to surrender to nighttime to put the phones down, the screens down. No more distractions. We're exhausted. We need a good season of sleep.
And in the autumn season we clear the way into dream time. So we do that in mineral season and then we come to Earth season. A couple of weeks between autumn and winter when the earth element comes to the fore. This is like we are already for bed and we're circling the bed. We're getting things already.
We might be fighting the impulse to get under the sheets, and it's a moment when we can be thoughtful about. How we want to come into bed, how we want to fall asleep, what rituals can I return to that will help me to come back to sleep? What steadiness do I need to feel in order to fall asleep? Well, do I want to pray for something or ask for a certain dream or say, thank you for the blessings of this day?
Do I need to hit refresh on my. Sleep rituals or recommit to getting the rest that I need. So you might consider in your own life right now where you need a reset that would help you to feel more balanced and quiet, that would help you to sleep easily, to fall asleep quickly, to sleep deeply, to wake up feeling rested.
A guiding question at this time in these earth days can be, how can I come back home to what is most real and nourishing right now? And rest inside of that when we've done the hard work of mineral season, when we have cut away or let fall away, what was dead? What had to go? We don't just go straight from that into the new life, the new thing, the the leaves are not growing on the trees right now.
There is a period of nothingness, and in that nothingness we are held by something and there is a tremendous amount of grace that can be felt in this time. After the cutting away, after the grief, the struggle. We get to rest inside of what, to me is a profound sense of grace, where I did something really hard that felt scary.
I might still be grieving it. I might not know what's gonna grow in its place, but I still, in my whole being, can feel like the earth is holding me like I'm in this supportive, loving web. Where something can come and say, well done. We know that was really hard, and this is a lot of what I have seen and learned this year in the work that I've done with many of you who are listening.
I have seen how loved we are, how much support we really have beneath around and above us. I have seen and heard your stories of support and love flowing to you from. The land itself, your wise and well ancestors are more than human kin. I have heard about your visitations from the birds, the deer, the fish.
I have heard about the wind. Gracing you with a message of profound dreams that your ancestors have sent you. And I know about the grace. That is holding all of us. But if we're always doing, doing, doing and accumulating and we're trying to go up, up, and up, we don't allow ourselves to come down and be held to be humbled, to fall asleep and come into the real magic of winter.
So if you have done some hard letting go of this autumn, make sure you give yourself a chance to feel loved and comforted afterwards or in the midst of that. Go and sit in the darkness on the land or in your home. Go to the ocean. Name your grief. Tell the earth what you did. And then open up your being, open your body to receive affirmation from the land and from your ancestors.
They see what you have sacrificed. They see what you have lost. They see your grief. They see what you have had to surrender or what disappointments you have suffered. And I believe they are proud of what you've done. And now they want to hold you inside of that. Make you some tea. Here's a blanket. Here's a beautiful sunrise.
Here's some mist in the trees. We love you. The ancestors don't expect you to slaughter everything that needed to die, and then just sit alone in your suffering. Abandoned. Autumn and mineral are sharp and harsh, but then winter comes and you are meant to be wrapped and quiet near the fire. Feeling proud of what you have done and comforted some magic will meet you this winter if you will do the work of mineral season and then become quiet and still on the other side of that.
So many of us miss out on that magic, on that ethereal, incredible next step in the cycle because of the activity of culture at this time, which again, I know is not all bad, but it really is just too much. So after mineral season, after the earth days comes the winter solstice, the beginning of water season.
This is a day between days. It is a moment of conception. It is a moment when something new. Sparks into being The new life is not here yet, but it has the potential to be. Something can be dreamed into on this day. Something created out of that grace and softness that catches us in the quiet and in the dark.
I had a beautiful experience last winter solstice, and I know some of you were there where we were out on the land and we had a big fire and we extinguished the fire to symbolize the diminishment of the sun on this day, and we stood around and the smoke and the fire hits. And it was, you know, very dramatic.
And then we each ventured out into the dark and we found a quiet place to sit on the land. And I sat at the base of a cedar tree with my son, who was four at the time, and there was the lightest, softest rain. And it was a full body experience of the grace of this time, and I could cry telling you about it because I just wish more of us experienced that on a regular basis.
The beauty that just profound holding. That is available after we do something hard, after we end something. It doesn't mean that it's easy, but I don't think enough of us have spent a winter solstice feeling kissed by the mist, holding our beloveds close in silence together, but quiet feeling the support of a living being behind you, feeling the support of the earth beneath you on the longest night of the year.
And this year, it's on December 21st, and I encourage you as much as you can to make some holy space and time for yourself on this day, on the winter solstice. We get to feel that holding, that being held, and we get to create dreams for our lives from that holding, not from a place of panic and feeling upheld or unsupported or forgotten.
But what are the dreams that you have for your life when you feel that level of support and love from the land, from the beings that you believe in, from your wise and well ancestors? What we can dream into is really different than what we feel like we can dream into or manifest when we're coming from a place of feeling alone.
So this winter solstice, I hope you will set off a tone, a ripple effect in your life through creating some quiet, holy space and on that day, speaking your intentions, what it is that you wish to grow between now, now being the winter solstice and the summer solstice in June. What do you want to grow in your life in the coming brightness?
And be as precise as you can with your language. I know a couple of you have shared how on the nose things were like dreams that you spoken to being in the winter solstice, and then how they literally came to life. And so we wanna be intentional and clear about our language and what we're calling in.
So I hope you have a quiet day. On the solstice, and I hope you do whatever it is that helps you to feel that love. That is like a river. Flowing beneath our feet at all times. To feel that and dream from that place and to embody how you want to feel in the growing seasons, embody that on the solstice. So if you know that you want to feel.
More powerful or connected to magic or more authentic in your life in the next year. Think of some ways, feel into some ways that you could embody that on the winter Solstice itself. What does it mean to move through a day feeling powerful or connected or authentic? Let that guide you into your own unique ritual on the solstice.
So with the winter solstice, we come into the winter season where we turn inward, water's direction is inward and we have fallen asleep. So something gets conceived on the solstice and we do not start making spreadsheets or buying wood to build with. No, no, no. We are asked to go to sleep. What is conceived on the solstice does not need your nature element, which is upward planning.
Spring energy, it needs water, it needs to come inward. It wants to float and flow and pool. In the winter, we conceive of new futures, but then we let them germinate. In silence. We let all that fell away in the autumn fully decompose and nourish our soil. We might be aware of these new dreams or the seeds within us.
We might sing to them or talk to them, but we allow them to be still and in the dark. We trust that they will know when and how to come to life in our lives. It is very difficult to have dreams and desires and nurture them indirectly, but it works. That is literally how new life is created. A tiny human begins by being conceived and the womb bearer.
The person cultivating that seed of new life may not even be aware of their presence, but there is nothing to be done except to be a womb for them. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Life knows how to be created, and we're part of that cycle every year, whether we have a womb or not. Whether we wanna give life to new humans or not, this is a universal truth and process that we can be a part of in our own unique way.
So something is conceived on the winter solstice, and then by Imbolc on February 1st, which is about halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, some of those new dreams or new seeds will begin to make themselves known. You know, we might have a. Understanding that like, oh, this is the new way of being I wanna have, or I am gonna explore this new offering and this seed is showing me another path. But other seeds, other dreams may take longer to open or bloom, and they may not open next year at all. So. Please, please, please consider what needs to fall away now in order for you to be able to sleep more and become a fertile, hydrated home for the dreams that you carry.
That will be conceived on this winter solstice, so I can give a couple of examples in case that's helpful. So let's say that someone has let go of their job this autumn. Whether they've like handed in their notice or they have just inside themselves, they have set a deadline and know that like this job is ending, they've started to pull their energy back away from it.
So the job is falling away and now they're dreaming into what else might be possible in their working life. So the seed, the glimmer that we. Plant or conceive or give life to on the solstice. And what we wanna nurture into the winter is the feeling state that we want to cultivate the core energy at the root of our vision.
So in the winter season, what I would recommend this person do is to cultivate. Through regular practice or creative expression or whatever fits for them to cultivate a vision of how they want to feel next in their working life. So if they desire freedom. Feeling that freedom, cultivating those feelings of freedom and allowing in a very soft, unattached way, allowing new ideas to come about how that might look in a working life, or let's say they want feel really proud of what they do.
Cultivating those feelings, letting them flow into their whole body. Imagining what they would be really proud of, how they would talk about their work, if they were really proud of it, what they might do, how they would stand, or. Sit or dress imagining how it would feel maybe to not work too much and still be able to meet their needs.
How would it feel to earn the income that they need and feel able to move or travel or do what they need to do and just letting all of those feelings that they desire flow, just like new water flowing into their being, activating that seed so that that seed, that dream. Knows that this life, this person is a friendly place in which to grow.
So your work this season, no matter what your dreams are, is literally to sleep more, to eat well, to go slow enough and to activate those feeling states so that they get strong. And then when it's time. Those feeling states can show you what next steps to take. So if I know that I need to feel free in my life, I'm much less likely.
To agree to things in my working life or agree to work that feels extremely constricting. We all have to make hard choices inside of capitalism. I'm not saying that we can all be wildly free with no cares at all, but. We can always access those feeling states as these like incredible guidance systems, these seeds that will show us a certain level of resonance, and then we can approach an opportunity or an option and see if that external option resonates with this seed, this dream, this desire I have planted in me, in my being.
I'll share one more example from my own life just in case it's helpful. So a part of my letting go this autumn was the letting go of one-on-one work. Being a primary part of my business for the last 10 years, I have worked one-on-one with people through long programs and have done a lot of coaching and guidance and have sort of always been, you know.
Ready to receive new one-on-one clients, and it just became clear this autumn that I'm not meant to put my energy there. I think I will still do some one-on-one work with people that I've taught with or done work with before. But overall, I'm not meant to be a sort of one-on-one service provider Right now.
Teaching is really the thing right now. That's where there's life and learning from the land and continuing those practices. So I've had to let. That piece of my work identity, that piece of my business go, and some new visions are making themselves known already about how the teaching might want to grow next year.
But I know that I need rest. So when I get an idea, I'm absolutely jotting it down. Sometimes I'll take a few minutes to dream into what that could look like, but I'm not doing much else. I trust my body to digest what has. Happened what I've let go of this autumn, and I trust that in my resting, in my paws, in my not grasping, I am becoming fertile soil again for what is going to grow next year.
So between now and the winter solstice, I will simmer in how I want to feel in my work next year, and I will try to embody some of that. I will consider. What seeds to plant now on the solstice that will be in my best and highest good and the best and highest good of all. On the solstice itself. I will do ritual to set those new intentions into being and declare how I wanna feel.
Then I will watch and see what happens this winter and spring. This is exactly how Eagle Creek came to life last year. It is how composting capitalism was born. This shit works and what grows from it is hardy and life giving and can be deeply aligned because again, it comes from that gracious. Point after we have surrendered, it comes in that point where we're drifting off to sleep.
It's easy, it's light, but it's powerful. So we let go with mineral. We feel the grace that comes. We feel the earth holding us out of that grace. We simmer in what feels good and we invoke more of that on the solstice. And then we wait and we do the work of becoming good soil. We sleep. We let our dream selves, we let the ancestors, the force of water, take care of the rest, and we will know when it's time for some of these seeds to begin growing and blooming in our lives, and we can trust that.
So, like I mentioned at the outset, I have created some things to support you in your winter work and you know, winter is the hardest season in the cycle. For many people literally, but also in our soulful growth cycle, it is really hard to give life to new dreams without attaching to them and squashing them With our analysis and planning.
A lot of people jump way into planning. Too early, so some things that could help you to really stay with the absolutely life-giving work of Winter are one, the Winter edition of The Living the Seasons Journal, which takes you week by week through the season and what the land is doing and how you can align with it.
That's available online at Books Buy slash Megan Leatherman. It's also available at Larksburg if you're in the Portland area. Larksburg is my favorite little magical shop, and the Winter Journal is stocked there. I also wrote a little book a couple of years ago called Winter at Work. It takes you through the winter season Zodiac sign by Zodiac Signs.
So Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, and guides you through some ideas about how to give life. To something new in your work in alignment with the land. And that book is available on my website at a wild new work.com/shop. On January 22nd, I'm gonna be teaching a public class called Flowing with Fear. One of water's primary emotions is fear, and I wanna talk about how you can develop a new relationship with fear and how to discern.
When the fear is telling you that these are unsafe waters to be in, you need to get out. And when the fear is telling you to swim deeper, because a lot of what's possible for us in the spring season and in the summer is on the other side of our fear. And I want to talk about how to work with that in a different way than you might be used to.
So you can learn more about that at a wild new work.com/events, and I'll put all of these links in the show notes for you. The last live thing that I want to talk about real quick is that my vocational guidance small group meant for more, begins again on February 4th. And there are, I think three or four spots left in the group.
And if you are sensing that something meaningful needs to change in your working life and you want to do that in alignment with the land and resource yourself so much that what comes out ready to grow does so naturally, I would love to have you. This group is a really different kind of orientation than what you might.
Find in any other career coaching situation, um, and it's really special and some amazing, amazing people come together as part of that group. So that begins February 4th, and you can learn more about that at a wild new work.com/guidance. Thank you so much to the members of Eagle Creek who are supporting the show financially and energetically.
Eagle Creek members receive a monthly behind the scenes email and have access to tarot readings with me and lots of other seasonal resources. And I love being in that relationship with you. And if you would like to join Eagle Creek, you can learn more about that at awildnewwork.com/eagle-creek. If you're not in a position to support the show monthly through Eagle Creek, I still welcome your dollars, however much you can send, and you can do that at buy me a coffee.com/meganleatherman. If this show has helped you in 2025 at all, I welcome your financial support, but also your sharing of the show, your reviews on Apple Podcasts, and just your sweet comments and reflections. I love, love hearing from you.
I read every email and every comment, and I treasure them. The podcast will be back in January, and as you might expect, it's been a very mysterious process of intuiting what the topic is going to be. I know that it has something to do with water and with the ocean in particular, but I'm not sure exactly yet how it's going to manifest, but I will be taking a retreat at the sea and I promise to bring back something as honest as I can make it in January, and I look forward to coming back to you then. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I hope you have been blessed by the podcast in 2025, and I am wishing you a very special, blessed, quiet, and powerful solstice.
Take such good care and I'll see you on the other side.