The past ten weeks of the Season of Unravelling have been personal. Grief has moved through our own bodies. We’ve followed it into our work, our teams, our unravelling stories. We’ve composted identities and roles and have started to let go of futures we thought were ours to hold, but none of that happened alone.
Even when it felt like solitary work, there were others whether seen or unseen, that were holding the edges. Some were obvious: the people who walked beside us, the mentors, friends, and elders who helped us name what was dying. Some were quieter, the trees that caught our silence, the magpies who stitched songs into the gaps between our thoughts, the creek that carried away what words couldn’t.
And some were older still, the kin whose blood runs in our veins, even if their stories never reached our ears. The ones who made choices, broke rules, or faced the world together so we could stand here, grieving and becoming.
Kinship across time
There’s a ring I wear—
gold worn thin by time,
passed down from hands I never held.
It belonged to my great-great-aunt—
a woman who lived through times
when women were not meant to choose for themselves.
She and her sister were bound by blood and circumstance,
woven together not just as siblings,
but as each other’s fiercest allies.
When one marriage collapsed—
a train station affair, whispers in the village,
the kind of scandal that could silence a woman for life—
they stood together.
They hired a man to watch and record,
staking out the evidence of a life unravelling.
They gathered proof like dry kindling
and carried it into the courtroom,
where the judge told them to return to silence.
When that failed, my great-grandmother refused to yield.
Even after she was ordered back to her husband,
she withheld what little power she had left—
her own body, her own choice.
It took nearly two years to win the right to leave,
but she did.
He married the girl from the train station.
She built a life she could live with.
The grief stayed underground for decades,
until it surfaced again—
not through whispered family stories,
but through digital archives and the sharp edges of curiosity.
I carry their story in my bones,
even though it was never given to me directly.
I carry it on my hand,
the ring a reminder that kinship is not always gentle.
Sometimes, it’s staking out the truth together.
Sometimes, it’s refusing to let the world bury you alive.
Sometimes, it’s standing side by side,
not for glory, but so no one has to stand alone.
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.