This thread is the one I most expected to find in a single season and instead found in all four. Death and dying move through this archive from its earliest weeks, and while they were never introduced as a single idea, reading the seasons in sequence brings them into sharp focus.
Modernity strives to hold our dead and dying at a maximum distance. It builds the veil into a wall, sequesters dying into institutions, and treats any traffic across the boundary as superstition or a symptom of something.
The Season of Unravelling made an immediate counter-claim: the veil is not a wall but a mist, something we can pass through and return from, carrying its traces on our skin. I now realise the remaining seasons were designed to test that claim through escalating degrees of intimacy, each one bringing the dead a step nearer than the last.
In Unravelling, my dead visited
They arrived first at the edge of vision: the butterflies said to carry the souls of the dead, dancing where grief and beauty refuse to separate. Unravelling named my dead as part of the kinship field, those who have crossed, those we carry in our bones and stories, those whose names we don’t know but who leave fingerprints in the soil, all those who once walked this land and knew how to listen long before we forgot.
They came as threshold kin, visitors at the periphery, and the season’s restraint held even here: not every butterfly is a message, and some are just butterflies. The visitation asked for nothing except the willingness to be visited.
In Drifting, one of them spoke
The second season holds the strangest and most personal moment in the whole archive. Out walking, the wind said deathwalker, and the world’s capacity to speak back stopped being a proposition and became an event on the skin, the breeze that raises the hairs on the arms, a soul encounter living in the body and the land.
The dead, or death itself, had moved from the edge of vision into the ear. Whatever one makes of such a moment, and the drift’s discipline was precisely to make nothing of it too quickly, a name had been given, and names create obligations that unfold in their own time.
In Seeding, they became the ground
The third season found the dead underfoot. The soil, I wrote then, is time made tangible: layers of forest, ocean, bone, ash and pollen, and our own bodies carry the same stratigraphy, ancestral traces of hunger and plenty, migrations, silences, songs. Roots remember, and whatever reaches upward is shaped by what lies beneath.
The name given in the drift became this season’s seed, deathwalker for modernity, carried into conversations with death workers and ritual holders, rummaged alongside death doulas and grief theory until its own shape emerged by contrast. What has died becomes the ground the offering grew from and the vocation it grew toward.
In Resonance, they were found inside
The fourth season completed the approach. Inherited patterns surfaced as off-notes: intergenerational trauma, learned fears, habits etched deep, arriving as stuckness or overreaction long after the people who first carried them have gone. The bus of the psyche turned out to have ancestors among its passengers, none of whom can be ejected, all of whom are coming along, the only question being who is allowed to drive.
The work became tending rather than exorcism, noticing, thawing, slowly clearing, letting the inherited notes be retuned rather than silenced. The dead, traced all the way in, were discovered already living in the nervous system, closer than the veil ever was.
The approach, seen whole
Across the four seasons, the dead crossed four distinct thresholds of intimacy: from the edge of vision to the surface of the skin, then into the ground beneath our feet, and finally, to the interior of the body itself.
This work never argued its claim about the mist; it demonstrated it through this escalating intimacy. This journey ended in a place modernity insists we should not look, leading to the recognition that the dead were never on the other side of anything. They were in the soil we plant, the names we are given, and the patterns we enact before we even know we are playing them. A culture that holds the dead at a distance has simply misplaced them.
The practice inside this echo keeps the season-one restraint intact. Somewhere on your ordinary route the dead have left a trace: a memorial bench, a street named for someone no one remembers, a tree planted by hands long gone and now outgrowing every fence around it, the land itself holding all those who walked it long before the suburb arrived.
The next time you pass one of these traces, let the noticing be the greeting, a silent acknowledgement that the ground you cross is occupied and has been for a long time. Nothing more is required, and not every trace is a message. The noticing is enough, and it is also, quietly, the beginning of the retuning.
Suggested practice: Roots Remember (Season of Seeding)
If this echo stirred something, the Roots Remember card offers a way to stand in it rather than think about it. Feet flat on the ground, you imagine the layers beneath you, nourishing and contaminated, ancient and immediate, then whisper one ancestral thread that lives in you and one belonging in the place where you stand, before offering one small gesture back to the shared soil.
The card walks the whole approach this piece describes, from the ground beneath you to the traces you carry.
The card costs A$6. The button takes you to Payhip for checkout, and the PDF lands in your inbox from there.
If a different threshold is the one you are actually standing at, the full set of cards is in the shop.
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 currently free to read on Kindle Unlimited, or available to purchase on Amazon.
The Season of Drift, Seeding, and Resonance are still being woven into their own long-form editions, so if this one resonates, there’s more of the Almanac still to come.