If you picture the four seasons of this work as a weave, the seasons themselves run lengthwise. Unravelling, Drifting, Seeding and Resonance form the long warp threads that gave the work its shape over a year of writing.
The Season of Echoes lets me do something I could not do while the weaving was underway, which is to pull a single weft thread sideways and watch how its colour changes as it passes through each season in turn.
The first thread I want to pull is the body.
When I read back across the four seasons, my body appears in every one of them, and in every one it was asked a different question. I never said so at the time, instead the connection sat there quietly, the way the creek sits beside my walking path, present in every season.
Unravelling asked the body what it was holding
Grief arrived in my body before it arrived in my understanding. I wrote in the first season about my iliopsoas seizing and my whole back locking, and about how every treatment helped a little until the real release came from grief itself: dropping into a hip-opening pose and howling, decades of held sorrow finally moving. My grief settled into muscle, fascia and nerve endings and made its home in my gut, spine, and between my shoulder blades.
The first season’s question to the body was a hospice question. What are you carrying that is ready to be laid down? My body answered in tremors, tears and long exhalations, none of which required interpretation and all of which required permission.
Drifting asked the body what it noticed at its edges
Once the grip loosened, the same body became an instrument of orientation. Whole-body listening grew out of standing at the edge of a creek swollen with floodwater, feeling wind move across my skin, letting my own bones insist that I stop. In the drift, my nervous system picks up shifts long before my mind has language for them: a breath that shortens, a stomach that turns, a subtle pull toward or away from a person, a place, a word.
The question had changed shape as the same body that had been asked what it held was now being asked what it sensed arriving, to notice the faint signals at the periphery, the whisper before the ripple.
Seeding asked the body whether the offering hummed
By the third season my body had become a testing ground. Embodied coherence before action was one of the season’s core movements, and in practice it meant holding each small offering in the body before placing it in shared soil. An offering that hums feels steady rather than urgent. An offering that clangs requires self-convincing, performance energy, a slight bracing in the chest.
My body knew the difference long before any framework could explain it. So, the season’s modesty of scale grew partly from the body itself, since a body can only vouch for offerings small enough to be felt whole.
Resonance asked the body what rang true
By the fourth season, my body had moved from testing ground to instrument proper. Tone, tuning, harmony: the whole musical architecture of Resonance rested on the recognition that the body is a thinking system. The gut carries over a hundred million neurons and the heart speaks to the brain through nerve, hormone and field. Interoception, the capacity to sense your own internal state, turns out to be trainable, and the training had been happening all along, season by season, without my ever narrating it as such.
The thread, pulled all the way through
Here is the connection I never made while the seasons were being written. The mind moved through four postures across the year: witness, companion, midwife, discerner but my body never changed posture at all. It was the warp beneath the weave, the continuous instrument through which each season asked a different question: what it held, what it sensed at its edges, whether an offering hummed, what rang true.
Seen this way, the have seasons never asked me (or anyone) to acquire a new capacity. They asked for the same capacity, which deepened over time and with repetition. A person who learns to feel grief moving through the hips already has everything required to feel an offering clang in the chest.
The Art of Unravelling turns out to be an apprenticeship to one’s own body, taken at four depths.
A quiet practice lives inside this echo, and it asks for nothing new. The next time you find yourself standing somewhere ordinary, a kitchen, a car park, the strip of green between your home and anywhere else, let your attention drop below your thoughts and ask which of the four questions your body is currently answering. Some days the answer will be grief, on others it will be a faint pull toward something that has no form yet. The question your body is answering will tell you more about where you are in the unravelling than any amount of thinking, and wherever that turns out to be is a fine place to be standing.
Suggested practice: Whole Body Listening (Season of Unravelling)
If you’d like to begin the apprenticeship where it began, the Whole Body Listening card holds the first of the four questions in practice form. It asks for five minutes anywhere you can feel earth, air or sky: feet on the ground, air on the skin, senses open, and then the simple enquiry, what do you notice? Everything else in this piece grew from that asking, and the card remains the doorway to all four depths.
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.