As we move deeper into the Season of Unravelling, we start to notice how grief isn’t something we hold alone. It’s woven into the land itself, into the silences between words, into the stories we inherit and the ones we lose.
This week, we sit with two books that hold these threads of mourning, kinship, and emergence: Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Together, they form a kind of compost library, books that don’t offer answers, but instead help us compost our certainties into richer, more fertile questions.
Hospicing Modernity: Holding the systems as they die
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira names something many of us have felt but struggled to language. Modernity is not a stable ground, but a system entering its own terminal decline. Her work invites us into the practice of hospicing, the holding of systems, stories, and selves as they die, with as much grace and clarity as we can muster.
This isn’t the work of heroic solutions. It’s the work of witnessing, with humility and care, the ways we are all entangled in the very systems we are mourning. We are not outside modernity, diagnosing it from a safe distance. We are inside it, breathing it, benefiting from it, even as it unravels around us.
To hospice modernity is to learn how to grieve the loss of futures we were taught to desire, while also making space for the futures we cannot yet imagine. It’s a practice of composting identity, economy, culture, and belonging. This is not to erase them, but to return them to the soil, so something new might root.
This book is not a roadmap. It’s a mirror, and an invitation to sit with the mess of being alive in this particular time.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Remembering kinship
Where Hospicing Modernity helps us sit with endings, Braiding Sweetgrass reminds us that we are never only unravelling, we are always already entangled.
Robin Wall Kimmerer braids her work as a botanist with her understanding as an Indigenous woman, offering us a vision of relational ecology that has always existed outside modernity’s frame. This is not the language of extraction, efficiency, or ownership. It is the language of reciprocity, reverence, and kinship.
Plants are not resources. They are teachers and kin.
Land is not territory. It is relationship.
Knowledge is not something we control. It’s something we’re invited into.
This book invites us into a different kind of knowing, one where grief and awe walk side by side, and where the survival of one species depends on the care extended to others. This isn’t romanticism, it is remembering how to belong.
Where Hospicing Modernity holds the dying, Braiding Sweetgrass holds the thread back to the living.
Awe Offering: “Wiyathul” by Gurrumul
In the spirit of this week’s theme: holding grief, kinship, and awe together, you are invited to listen to Wiyathul, performed by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.
Gurrumul’s voice carries something words can’t touch, I experience is as a felt sense of connection to land, to ancestors, to the stories sung into place long before modernity arrived. There’s grief in it, and reverence, and that ache of beauty we sometimes call awe.
There’s no analysis required, listen and let it move through you, as weather moves through trees.
Season of Unravelling: a playlist for grief, kinship and awe
Grief moves through us in waves, they have been rising, receding, reshaping the ground beneath our feet. This playlist is a companion to the first season of The Art of Unravelling: a sonic drift through sorrow, tenderness, resilience, and quiet wonder.
Some songs hold the ache of endings. Others hum with the persistence of life, with the strange, unbidden beauty that insists on finding us even in loss. Together, they form a kind of tide which is pulling us under, lifting us up, carrying us forward.
Let it play...let yourself drift.
Find this in book form
The Season of Unravelling has its own home beyond Substack now. It’s the first in a four-part Almanac, the expanded long-form telling of this whole year-long inquiry, with Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding, and Resonance each becoming their own book.
This first one, The Season of Unravelling, is 59 pages: longer than a single Substack post, shorter than a commitment. It weaves the original posts into one fuller arc, with the threads, the practices, and the reflections that the weekly format never had room for. It’s available to purchase on Amazon.
The Art of Unravelling is offered as a gift, sustained by those who feel called to support the weaving. If you’d like to help tend the fabric of this work, you can contribute via the link below.