The start of a new season

Morning, friends!

Happy Solstice!!

Today's letter is about life seasons. Before I get to it, a couple quick announcements:

First: I'm hosting a yoga retreat with my friend Catherine for the New Year! Read up on the details here and let me know any questions.

Secondly, please meet my new child and center of my world:

This is Maddie!! Full name Miss Madera lol

She is taking up a lot of my time lately but while she sleeps, today I write.

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In April, I visited the red rocks of Sedona with two long-time friends. It was nourishing and beautiful, as Sedona often is, and we all left feeling relaxed. For certain the afternoon siestas helped, but I’d also argue that’s how the energy works there. Whatever you need out of your time — to charge up or power down — Sedona provides.

Seasons work in much the same way, even if we don't always like which one we are in. I recently found myself relating to Mari Andrew's essay on life seasons. As I read it back, my head is nodding, my eyes filling with tears. I have to take pauses while reading it, letting the words soak into me along with this knowledge that I'm not alone, this knowing that others with such layered emotions and lenses on the world exist and that we're all connected through writing, through music, through other pulses of creation.

There is a certain tension, as a writer, to reading someone else’s words and feeling as though they were broadcast from your soul.

The light says: I feel seen and connected.

The shadow says: I feel like a failure that I didn't get to writing it first.

One is abundance, the other is scarcity. I’m sure this is a normal feeling and it’s one I grew accustomed to reading The Midnight Library, asking into the void, "How is this so good? And why am I so mad about how much I love it?” It’s possible I wrote a similar story in a dream once or while swimming laps last Friday, but that’s not how art works. Liz Gilbert would say that laws of creative energy mean your ideas don’t belong to you, but they simply exist, like matter. Choose to get them down on paper or don't, but eventually they'll evaporate from your desk drawer or passing rumination and solidify through someone else’s pen into existence. Austin Kleon might say we’re all just stealing like artists.

I wonder about holding the light and the dark of this creative envy as the same time. So I decided to look humbly at Mari's insightful seasonal reflections as a template for my own.

Summer

My thirty-first year was a summer season to a tee. Mari writes of the Life Summer: "It’s abundant, big, social, and magical. Summer is on overdrive, in heat." And I was certainly…in heat. I spent my 31st birthday in Ecuador, swimming in the waters of the Galapagos and feeling on top of the world before returning to D.C. and spending several months dating fascinating and gorgeous men who I held no attachment to because I was leaving to move west. I don’t think I wore a winter coat for a year. I reveled, I wrote, I joined my first writing workshop, and I resigned from my job at National Geographic feeling electric and magnetic, stepping into the unknown of the desert with a one-way plane ticket and fantasies of a writerly life untethered to corporate America. Not long after I settled in, I found love and midnight epiphanies of novel story ideas and, well, a lot of feelings, too. There were many high highs and low lows.

📖  

Fall

I spent my thirty-second birthday curled up alone in bed in true form to the start of a true Life Fall: a season that as Mari writes is, "plagued with homesickness, but often without a clear idea of what or where home is." I looked for home in many places during this season: in my then-boyfriend, in the new city I found myself, in my body, in my writing, in nature, on Zillow and in endless Craigslist rental listings. When a feeling of home alluded me, and everything was shed (as fall is wont to do), my relationship ended, I got laid off, and I had to move — I started a journey I would later refer to as my endless autumn. I took a roadtrip that happened to coincide with the peak foliage of Colorado, Idaho, Oregon and Utah until arriving back to Arizona where I landed softly alongside the brilliant gold leaves of the Cottonwood trees. Shortly after, Catherine and I led a yoga retreat in Sedona that reminded me, yes, this is what I want to be doing and here I am, doing it. The entire year felt like remembering again. I was entirely unrooted and somehow, I found that feeling of home through the daily practices I still absolutely must do that sustain me.

I believe it was on my drive back from that retreat where I noted a pattern forming. I realized that my endless summer had turned crispy into an endless fall, and in the pit of my stomach the anxious part of me wondered: what if my endless winter was next? 

📖 

Winter

Winter is my least favorite season. As I try to recall what I did on my thirty-third birthday, I scroll back in my phone's photo album to find that I made a breakfast bowl, toured a townhouse my agent was selling that I detested and passed on which would've locked in a monthly payment about half what I'd pay now, got my second covid shot. Thus began my winter of misplaced, irrational discontent.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a fine year. I poured my energy into hosting several yoga series in addition to finally manifesting the kind of income I’ve deserved but never made for years, and worked hard at building a freelance career that month by month afforded me less and less. Many good things happened for my career, and I can rattle them off with little emotionality. I took very good care of my health, drank much less, built a home for myself in my first place, felt very adult.

But over various personal successes and life milestones, there was a dull veneer. As Mari writes, "Being in a Life Winter is pretty bleak: not a lot of motivation or novelty coming to the surface, and not a lot of true joy or true sorrow either.” It felt like I'd found home but had nothing to write there about. Most of the writing I poured my soul into was seen by less than 30 people, which felt intimate and quiet. I hit roadblocks and failed tests. I fell, got injured, felt lonely for the first time in a long time, canceled a trip to Costa Rica, put in offer upon offer for houses that were not accepted, had several rescue dog applications fall through, and struggled to connect with any of the men I dated. I wanted nothing more than another endless summer, and grew cynical. So as nature took its course and I realized the season, I surrendered and resigned to select the word “slowly” for my word of 2022, as it was the only pace that seemed possible.

The thing about a life winter is that it teaches you what's worth fighting for, and what's worth letting go.

📖 

Spring

Which brings me to my current year, 34. As Mari says: “Life Spring is fun because it's a blank page. It's full of potential, simply awaiting action. Spring is also scary because it's a blank page…Spring is a good reminder: Live the process, live the questions.” It does not seem a coincidence in hindsight that I spent my 34th birthday in an energy vortex. I do feel a shift in the season coming through, along with a call to re-invent, to compost the hundreds of thousands of words I have poured into these letters over the years in a new way. I am getting curious about rehabbing imbalances and dysfunctions in my body that have caused me to trip and fall for years and for the first time I feel hopeful about that and consequently I'm reimagining my meditation and movement offerings.

I feel as though I’m opening a fresh notebook of blank pages. And a new puppy? There's nothing fresher than that.

So it feels right to announce that, friends, this is my last issue of Om Weekly. I have written it for nearly a decade(!) and I'm ready to try something new, with a new format and a new name, and a new permission slip I'm giving myself to not worry what people might think about what I say or don't say or if it fails spectacularly.

I know this new letter will be about music, movement, ritual and nature. After several rounds of customer service with Substack and realizing it's actually quite hard to import a newsletter when you have over a half a gigabyte of words, the message from the universe was clear: just start over. So that's what I'm going to do, a fresh life-spring start.

Living the questions is something I'm pretty accustomed to, and this is my season.

I’m not sure which season you’re in, but I can say this: it might feel endless, but I promise it won’t last forever. Even if it’s not your favorite, it could just be you’re exactly where you need to be.

I'll be back in your inbox with a new face soon. If you're into it, I hope you'll stick around!!

Love,
Kelly (and Maddie)