Late Wintering
natural disasters, depression, and inevitable breakthroughs
Welcome to Our Beloved Depths: a written ritual offering where I offer story medicine as a way to process my personal and collective grief practices with you. It will contain guidance to support you to navigate grief, as well as everything you want to know about upcoming offerings and opportunities to work with me.
This newsletter is a longer form, a slower pace, and an invitation to go a bit deeper. It is offered freely; all content is available without being a paid subscriber. If you are able and you find yourself deeply supported by my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your contributions fill the gap between the value of this work, and the ways grief work and healing work in general tend to be undervalued and under-resourced.
“Our Beloved Depths” is borrowed from the name of a card from the Wild Chorus oracle deck. It invites us to go inward and downward to do the profound shadow work, in collaboration with our ancestors and the histories of the land, that can restore wholeness across time. This is how we reclaim our magic.
“We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
- Katherine May, Wintering
It almost feels redundant to write about grief right now.
My mind wants to go back to the loss and shock of 2020’s onset of the pandemic and how it facilitated displacement of home and upended relationships which led me to relocate back to the place I had fled four years prior. This involuntary uprooting put me in touch with the unprocessed community organizing trauma I had been avoiding since 2016. So here I was, slowly recovering, strengthening my root, and finding myself anew in this old home place, when a hurricane hits my “climate safe” mountain town causing massive flooding, major loss of life, and leaving my local community in shambles. It was shocking to see water covering gas stations and bridges, blocking road after road as I desperately and unsuccessfully tried to navigate a way home from the hotel we had evacuated to that had lost power. I didn’t take any pictures. I tried my best to stay in my body amidst uncertainty and fear, to appear grounded in the eyes of my partner, to hold it together for my eleven year old and for myself.
And I did hold it together. I’m great in a crisis. I was a practical, caring, prudent, and compassionate community member in my interactions. I moved slowly and with intention. I centered emotional care for myself and those around me. I checked on my friends and offered valuable support. I distributed herbal medicine to my neighbors. I took in donations and moved them to people in need. I rested a lot and didn’t rush to enter the fray of frenzied helpers. When I was ready, I connected with folks I was already in community with to see where I could be supportive. I installed a beautiful healing space in collaboration with a local meditation retreat center, distributed herbal medicine and stoked community fires with an established local herbal mutual aid crew, hosted song circles to soothe our nervous systems, and helped establish a local meditation group for people of color that is still active. That was fall.
Then winter rolled in like a low fog all haze and quiet, and by January I found myself in my first sustained depressive episode since 2017. The conditions of this season facilitated a much deeper wintering than I’ve ever undertaken before. My usual seasonal wintering process includes slowing down, working less, turning inward, grieving more, closing the prayer for that year’s community grief ritual, and processing the year I’ve had on all levels. Last year’s community grief ritual’s humble endeavor to restore the erotic and heal the collective womb sent me diving into the depths of the collective shadow of humanity examining patriarchal violence and violence against children in particular, and I have to tell you, processing the personal and collective grief I kicked up was no small task.
Add to that the sagging weight of the growing death tolls of innocents in Palestine and Congo (STILL) and maybe things are looking a bit better in Sudan, but there is so much devastation in so many places and also there was a major natural disaster where I live and there was a big flood and hundreds of landslides and washed out roads and we lost so many trees and all my favorite parks along the river were destroyed and even though it’s six months later, I still have to take a detour whenever I leave home which is triggering and they are just now getting to the task of clearing the river of debris. That river is my best friend.
And the soundtrack to all of it is the destructive, disorienting, and incessant death rattle of empire. I can’t even go there right now.
It’s been a lot, y’all.
So I took three months off instead of one. I allowed myself to do nothing, which was incredibly uncomfortable at first. At first, I filled the space with various kinds of entertainment and found it difficult to be with myself. Over time, though, I settled into the quiet of less scheduled activity and more open space, and eventually I found myself in the churning gyre of grief: heartbreaking realizations about myself and the world crashed into doubts about the future and feelings of failure and hopelessness. The grief came rushing in like flood waters displacing my capacities to perform normalcy and leaving me exhausted. Too much grief can indeed trigger depression, and unfortunately, it did for me. After a number of grim weeks and with great difficulty, I clawed my way out of what I call “The Pit,” the extended freeze response where life is filtered through a doom lens and doing anything feels like rolling a boulder up a hill. Even when I was no longer depressed, I continued to have this sense that alongside the standard dimension of reality, I was navigating an underworld of buried griefs and secret fears and underbellies and all I could do was continue on in hopes of arriving somewhere different at some point… hopefully soon? I really needed to get back to my outward facing work and do my taxes and tend to so many other lingering logistics. I didn’t know when or if I would make it to the other side of this seemingly endless shadowy liminal reality.
If you’ve made it this far, dear reader, I’m grateful to tell you that I have arrived someplace different. It has been a breakthrough, a treacherous escape from the confines of a cocoon, a difficult birthing of myself, a blessed turned corner. It is still fresh, and I am distrustful that it will stick to be honest. Though I can admit that I feel myself in calming waters, no longer being thrashed around at the whim of the mindless flood. I have clarity now where before there were only intense emotions and doubt. There is still uncertainty. There is still grief here; it is beginning to flow and is ready to move now. I am still in a posture of surrender. Only now it feels much easier to lean into what is beautiful, to enjoy what there is to enjoy, to open myself up to pleasure, and to let some hope in. There’s a little equanimity here too now.
This is what has been unfolding in my absence from our collective healing endeavors together. I’m slowly peeking out of my late wintering cave, and giving myself space to shake off the disorientation as I adjust to being in this dimension again. I’m feeling excited to return to collective grief practice this month, and I also have some new offerings that I am excited about rolling out in sweet time, beginning with this reboot of my newsletter (formerly known as Grief Pages) here on Substack. I am excited to write in a slightly longer form and I want to be sharing more deeply about my personal and collective grief practices for my own wellbeing. I hope it can be beneficial for you, too.
Please share with me any reflections or curiosities that arise in you after reading these words; I would be so grateful to hear from you. I wish you many insights and breakthroughs in this potent time, big blessings on all of your endings and beginnings, and I hope to grieve with you soon.
Tips for Navigating Apocalyptic Conditions
Because things are so unfathomable in all directions, I’m inclined to share with you some practices that support me to navigate the current circumstances. I want to say that I am not perfect at implementing these practices all of the time, and you don’t have to be either in order to experience supportive results. Discipline isn’t about perfection, it is about intention and dedication. Just stay with it as you are able.
Lean into time magic.
Time is weird, and it just seems to be getting weirder and weirder. My advice: lean into the weird of it. What day is it? How long has it been since we talked last? Was it two weeks or two months ago? Who knows!? Surrender the need to be in linear time in a perfect way. Resist the pattern of filling up your calendar and allow yourself more spaciousness. You will find that you can stretch a five minute break into what feels like a luxurious 20 minutes, or that difficult meeting you were dreading can fly by when preceded and followed by a little spacious meandering. Practice creating some distance from the pace of capitalism by spending just five minutes getting still with yourself each day.
Maintain simple grounding and centering practices.
The task of maintaining a robust supportive morning practice can be overwhelming, especially when things are hard. What is a simple practice you can do each day, no matter what, to support yourself? Perhaps it’s pulling a card (that’s mine), moving your body, meditation, prayer, having herbal tea, or sitting at your altar with your ancestors for a few minutes. A small action that you repeat each day can go a long way to providing some solid ground beneath you.
Be in relationship with the land.
Your relationships to the lands you live on, originate from, and even visit can shore you up and keep you in touch with the part of you that is connected to everything else. Go outside with reverence and an intention to connect. Find a moment to notice open sky, the ground beneath you, trees reaching upwards, a bird song, an expansive view, some moving water. Consider all of the beings who have inhabited the land across time and offer gratitude. Consider the unseen guardians of the land and ask for permission, protection, or collaboration. See your own body as an extension of the earth.
Upcoming Offerings and Opportunities
As I mentioned above, I have a number of new offerings brewing, but I’m not ready to spill everything just yet. What I can do is give you a first look at the flyer for 2025’s community grief ritual. (!!!) Registration will open this Sunday (don’t worry, I’ll send a reminder to register) and we will grieve together again (finally!) on April 27 at 12pm Eastern. Save the date!
Until soon, dear ones.
Ekua
phewf thank you for this. i have been heavy with grief today, flitting in and out of feeling it and feeling overwhelmed by it. reading your words helped open me up. helped me to cry. thank you for sharing deeply, for being of service with your words <3