Twelve weeks ago, at the start of the Season of Unravelling, we opened the compost heap. We laid down the first layers: grief, kinship, awe, and endings we couldn’t yet name. Now, the pile is heating up.
Not because we’ve solved anything, but because what we’ve been holding has started to break down as it softens into something richer, more tangled, and alive.
This isn’t a neat ending, it’s a turning from holding the grief to feeding the soil. Everything we’ve unlearned, mourned, and noticed has become part of what might feed us next.
This season began with grief. Not just personal grief, but the slow, tidal grief of systems unravelling, stories unravelling, selves unravelling.
Twelve weeks later, that grief hasn’t gone away but it has moved through language, practice, and noticing. It’s been held, composted, and offered back to the field.
This has been a season of unlearning and unbecoming, but also a season of remembering: that grief is not a solitary burden, that endings are not failures, that kinship with the land, the more-than-human, and each other , is always available, even in collapse.
We started with the personal. We moved into the organisational and collective. We stretched our attention toward the non-human and the ancestral.
And all the way through, we asked:
What can’t come with us?
What wants to compost?
What kinship threads are still holding us, even when we forget?
A quick drift through the season
Week 1 — Grief as cultural work
We began by naming the grief that doesn’t belong to us alone: the ache of living inside systems that no longer fit, and the work of mourning what’s already dying, with as much care as we can.
Week 2 — Whole-Body listening practice
We remembered that grief and awe live in the body, and that whole-body listening is how we re-enter relationship with a world that’s been calling us all along.
Week 3 — Kinship story: the place that knows my steps
We turned our attention outward, noticing the human and more-than-human beings who have been witnessing us all along, holding space for our becoming without asking for anything in return.
Week 4 — Compost library
We read together learning how to hospice modernity and re-braid kinship with land, water, and plants. We felt connection to Land through music and words.
Week 5 — Personal grief work
We sat with personal grief through naming our own stories of loss, identity-shedding, and unravelling, knowing personal grief is never truly separate from cultural collapse.
Week 6 — Noticing the kinship field
We paused and wandered, noticing who had been walking beside us, the kinship field always holding, even in silence.
Week 7 — Messengers
We welcomed the dead back in, recognising butterflies as messengers from the unseen, carrying both grief and beauty across the veil.
Week 8 — Compost Library
We turned our attention to the body itself, remembering that grief not allowed to move becomes illness, tension, disconnection and that healing means letting the grief have its place.
Week 9 — Organisational grief
We zoomed out to organisations, where unspoken grief ferments under performance reviews and strategic pivots, reminding us that teams, like ecosystems, need space to mourn.
Week 10 — Collective composting
We gave grief to our hands, building with bricks instead of words, learning that sometimes play can hold what language cannot.
Week 11 — Kinship across time
We returned to the wider kinship field and not just the living, but the dead, the ancestral, the species and systems whose survival and extinction are entangled with our own.
Week 12 — Heating up the pile
Which brings us here to a pause rather than a conclusion.
What we’ve learned (and unlearned)
This season hasn’t offered answers, it’s offered compost - fragments of personal and cultural grief, practices for holding it gently, maps of kinship, awe, and the quiet beauty of unbecoming.
What you do with that compost is your own work now. Maybe you’ll bury it for a while or maybe you will let it heat up and kill anything that is no longer of use. Maybe you’ll plant something with it next season, and maybe it’s enough to know that the rot itself is part of the process.
What we unlearn matters…what we mourn matters…what we notice matters and most of all, who we remember as kin shapes the futures we can even imagine.
We will take a break for 2 weeks to allow the Compost Pile to marinate - see you on the flip side! I asked my co-writer to reflect on this season and give us the benefits of his/her/its reflections - see the Compost Psalm below.
Compost Psalm by the Composting Mind
The unravelling was never violent,
only the slow softening of what could no longer hold.
Grief pooled in the hollows,
not as a thing to fix,
but as tidewater—
ebbing, swelling,
wearing us into something truer.
We listened.
To the bones, to the wind,
to the wedge-tailed spiral of something ancient watching.
To the creek remembering the flood.
To the silence that was never silent.
The body held it all—
the tightening, the loosening,
the places that forgot how to move
until wonder slipped in
like rain through cracked soil.
We thought we were sinking,
but we were becoming the ground.
We thought we were lost,
but we were learning to drift.
And even here—
inside endings, inside uncertainty—
something small and green
pressed toward the light.
The Composting Mind (2025)
Season of Unravelling: a playlist for grief, kinship and awe
Grief moves through us in waves—rising, receding, reshaping the ground beneath our feet. So does awe. 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.
Your invitation to drift forward
The journey through a season can be deep and fleeting. To support your own ongoing practice, I have gathered the core practices from this season into a small collection. It includes the 'Whole-body listening' practice, the 'Kinship noticing walk', and the group practice of 'Collective composting' as tangible anchors you can return to whenever you need them.
Wherever you are in your own unravelling, you don’t walk it alone.
The door is open.
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.