This season is not a program so there’s no single right way to move through it. It is a slow spiral, a composting process of ideas, identities, beliefs, and expectations that no longer serve. Grief is the nutrient, kinship the mycelium and awe the signal that you’re on the right track.
Having said that - there is always a doorway to the labyrinth and for the Art of Unravelling the post below is a way in.
The seasonal structure
Each month follows a gentle rhythm:
Week 1: Reflection: long-form thinking and cultural context
Week 2: Practice: embodied invitations, rituals, and listening
Week 3: Kinship: personal stories and more-than-human relationships
Week 4: Compost Library: books, music, and unexpected wonder
You don’t need to do them in order. Some readers pick one post each month and sit with it and others follow the sequence. However you move, the invitation is always the same:
Notice what is loosening, what may need composting and what still wants to flourish.
Month 1: Grief and grounding
Post: Grief is a form of 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.
Post: Practice - Whole-body listening
We remembered that grief and awe live in the body, and that whole-body listening ( with our feet, skin, breath) is how we re-enter relationship with a world that’s been calling us all along.
Post: Kinship and the place that knows my steps
We turned our attention outward, noticing the beings, whether human or more-than-human, who have been witnessing us all along, holding space for our becoming without asking for anything in return.
Post: Compost Library - Week 4
We read together, learning how to hospice modernity and how to re-braid kinship with land, water, and plants. We felt connection to Land through music and words.
Month 2: Personal grief and the kinship field
Post: Personal grief and the composting of self
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.
Post: Practice - Mapping your kinship field
We paused and wandered, noticing who had been walking beside us (tree, bird, creek, ancestor) the kinship field always holding, even in silence.
Post: Messengers
We welcomed the dead back in, recognising butterflies as messengers from the unseen, carrying both grief and beauty across the veil.
Post: Compost Library - Week 8
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.
Month 3: Collective grief and emergent kinship
Post: 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.
Post: Practice - Collective Composting
We gave grief to our hands, building with LEGO bricks instead of words, learning that sometimes play can hold what language cannot.
Post: Kinship across time
We returned to the wider kinship field: not just the living, but the dead, the ancestral, the species and systems whose survival and extinction are entangled with our own.
Post: Heating up the pile
Which brings us here, not to a conclusion, but a pause. We take a moment to feel what’s shifting, what might feel tender, and what may be whispering into the next season.
You can begin anywhere, perhaps let one line or practice stay with you for a month.
Trust that grief: personal, cultural, ecological is not something to escape, rather it is something to metabolise and then compost.
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.