Week 2: Season of Unravelling
As we move deeper into the Season of Unravelling, we begin to shift from reflection into practice. Grief can be intellectualised, analysed, even rationalised — but it doesn’t move that way. Grief lives in the body, and it often reveals itself through sensation long before it finds words. Awe works the same way. It catches in the throat, in the widening of your eyes, in the pause before you remember how to breathe again.
The practice this week is Whole-Body Listening. This is one I’ve been learning slowly. Not from books, but from standing at the edge of a creek swollen with floodwater, feeling wind move across my skin. I am hearing the quiet insistence of my own bones, asking me to stop, to feel, to stop again.
Whole-body listening has been practiced by countless cultures and traditions: from Indigenous ways of knowing to somatic and ecological awareness practices. This version has emerged through my own relationship with the land I walk and the grief and awe moving through my own body. I offer it not as a method, but as an invitation into your own noticing.
Whole-body listening offers a way to come into direct relationship with both, with the grief already alive inside you and the awe that waits just at the edges of your attention. This practice is about noticing where you already belong, whether to the land beneath your feet, to the air moving across your skin, and/or to the unseen kin who have been waiting for your attention.
Whole-body listening is not about extraction. It’s not about finding answers or gathering data, even from yourself. It’s about dwelling, we stay with what is, without rushing to make sense of it. It asks you to pause, to move slowly, to bring all your senses into the present moment. It’s a practice of simply being here, now, in a body, on this land, inside this unravelling time.
The body itself becomes both anchor and guide, it is the part of you that knows how to be in relationship long before the mind catches up. Through the soles of your feet, the shift of air across your skin, the taste of the weather before it breaks, you begin to remember what it feels like to belong. Not as something earned, but as something inevitable, a thread already woven between you and the world.
A simple whole-body listening practice
This week, you’re invited to take this practice out into the world. Choose a place you can linger, somewhere outside, if possible, but anywhere you can sit or stand quietly without distraction will work.
Let yourself arrive there without agenda. This is not a walk to clear your head, or a moment to sort through your thoughts. It’s a practice of listening with your whole body.
1. Feet: Notice the ground beneath you. Feel the texture, the temperature, the subtle shifts underfoot. Let your weight settle into gravity, not as something to fight, but as something to lean into.
2. Skin: Let the air meet you. Notice its movement: is it warm, sharp, still? Feel how your skin drinks in information before you name it.
3. Breath: Notice the rhythm of your breathing. Not to change it, just to sense it. Notice if the air tastes different: metallic before rain, sweet after sun, dry with heat or salt.
4. Ears: Let your hearing stretch outward. Not just for the obvious (human sounds, machinery)but for the quieter presences: wind through leaves, the scrape of a bird landing, water moving under or beside you. Listen for the sound under the sound.
5. Gut: Notice if your body is speaking. Is there a knot, a loosening, a tightening? Does grief, awe, or something unnamed rise up as you pay attention? You don’t need to fix or interpret it. Just notice it’s there.
Stay with the sensations for as long as feels right. You may be there for five minutes, maybe twenty. There’s no right duration, only what your body allows. When you feel complete, you can thank the land, the air, and your own body for holding you, even if you didn’t feel much at all. Listening itself is the practice.
After the practice
If something wants to be remembered (a sensation, a noticing, a question) you might jot it down, but some experiences resist language, and that's part of the point. This is not about documenting. It’s about noticing where you already belong: to land, air, body, and the wider kinship field.
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.