The Sacred Seasonal Gap (Plus a Poem)
On devoting yourself to unlearning and owning your own story
Come the Autumn Equinox
I will, with these arms,
gather in my own harvest,
and once the table is laden with the fruits of the season,
I shall stop gorging on shame
but feast on truth instead.
I’m not ready to dive headfirst into the dark below,
but do resolve to start to see what’s swimming in the deep
roiling beneath the waves
a silent and stealthy enemy in the shadows,
but once pulled from the underneath
and into the light,
an honest friend
with a message in a bottle
meant for me.
(Poem composed today, September 8th, 2023 while sitting at a desk in the Guides’ Room (formally a boarding bedroom / bedchamber of Anna Alcott, the real life Meg March of Little Women) in the Orchard House, Concord, MA, where Louisa May Alcott penned said book, Little Women, in 1868.)
Friends, I am dropping into your inbox this week with an inaugural poem, written expressly for this new digital home of ours, and inspired by the back to school energy of this first week of September. Poetry is one of my most beloved languages to speak in, and it’s truly how I notice, think through, and engage with the world on a day to day basis. I hope it adds a few drops of delight to your Friday.
On the subject of poetry, you can expect me to share poetry on a regular basis in the newsletter. “Perpetual Poetry”, as I’m calling this new “sometimes” series, may take the form a stand-alone poem, or it may be a poem accompanied by some longer form reflections for the week. By offering some editions of the weekly newsletters that contain poetry and longer reflections, my hope is that you can tailor your reading to what suits you best during any given week.
Only have a few moments to read before your day barrels onward? Enjoy the poem and pass on the long form reflection.
Love poetry and looking for something to sink into for a bit longer? Permission granted to continue reading post-poem for more thoughts on the experiences, stories, and feelings that inspired it.
Poetry not your thing? Simply scroll past to the week’s longer form newsletter reflection. Voila!
Lastly, because I personally love learning when and where poems by my favorite writers were composed, in each edition of “Perpetual Poetry”, I will include a line or two letting you know where I penned the specific poem.
This Substack (and all of life, no?) is truly an experiment, and I’m long done with following writing conventions and rules. I’ve thrown away the box and am going rogue. I hope you’ll come with me.
As always, I’d love to hear if anything feels particularly resonant for you, and encourage you to pass this post along to someone in your life that may need some support in this sacred seasonal gap. I’ll look forward to sending you some more mail next week! In the meantime, take good care of yourselves and each other.
(If you enjoy poetry, you are welcome to explore three of my published poetry collections: New Bird, Wild Unfolding, and Like Gold. You can also follow me on Instagram (handle is @theperpetualvisitor), where I share my scribbled verses from time to time.)
Read on for more reflections on this Sacred Seasonal Gap we are currently living in…
“It’s fall now! Isn’t it?” a friend of mine asks with joy in her voice, chased by doubt. Before I can answer, another chimes in, “I think it’s still summer until September 23rd.”
I add my voice to the debate. “But it is definitely starting to feel like fall!” I’m always up for a compromise.
Yes, it’s currently hovering at just under 90 degrees in Boston, the antithesis of crisp autumnal weather, but rest assured, when I had this exchange with my friends, the day had begun just short of 60 degrees with a bit of dew on the grass. On that particular morning, for the first time this summer, I felt the subtle but sure crispness in the air, the kind of seasonal signal sent to let us know that despite the warm glow of mid-day, fall is slowly but surely wending its way to us.
As I always do at this time of year, I feel smack dab in the middle of the space between summer and fall. I feel in between weather-wise, one moment wearing a soft caramel colored cardigan as I get up in the morning to feed my cat, the next, digging into the back left corner of my bottom dresser drawer, fingers seeking a clean tank top to don to relieve my overheating. I am caught between photographing the soft salmon colored roses that continue to gush open in my neighborhood and the handful of discolored leaves that have already fallen onto the sidewalk, awaiting a foot under which to enthusiastically crunch. The heat of the emotional connections I made with loved ones the last few months still burns, and at the same time, I feel the coming coolness of the psychological challenges that visit me when there is less daylight and colder temperatures.
All this is layered on top of feeling the vague but intriguing, though somewhat distressing discomfort of sensing that the current gap isn’t simply seasonal, but a sacred space that looking back, will lead me between different chapters of my life. Mixed messages from my own mind and heart mimic this moment of the meshing of the summer and fall seasons. The feeling of being eager to move forward into a new chapter, and still holding tight to what has come before, and what currently is. Wanting the summer roses and the cool dew at the same time. A Frankenstein of a season that’s my own making.
This gap, this sensation of teetering on the fault line between seasons, is accentuated by the physical return of hundreds of thousands of students to Boston for the start of another school year. The quiet(er) air of summer in the city stirs as moving trucks pull up to rented apartments, Green line streetcars are crammed with newly minted high school graduates, off to the big city for their first day of the rest of their lives, and short yellow school buses navigate the twisty one way streets in the city like bees, their doors clicking open and closed as they collect little ones wearing too-big-for-them backpacks, off to their first day of kindergarten. Fall trade school programs launch, seeing learners of all ages embarking on a new chapter, balanced precariously on top of existing jobs, family commitments, and a slew of all sorts of other Life Stuff. Countless workers, having not enjoyed a formal summer break, walk a bit faster to the subway, knowing that the click of the calendar over to September somehow signifies that the pace will pick up.
Whether or not I have been a student or a teacher when September kicks off, I can’t help but sense this shifting of gears. As this changing of the seasonal guard takes place, I am once again filled with a longing to buy a brand new blank notebook and a box of pencils, and fill the clean white pages with facts and feelings, questions and quests. I tend to treat fall like many people treat January 1st: a time ripe for resolutions. I vow to read this and study that. I rededicate myself (once and for all) to leaping forward in some way, be it academically, professionally, or personally. I crave being able to quantify tangible, measurable progress.
In past autumns, I have taken on learning or doing something new: finally vowing to buckle down and finish writing a draft of a play, acting in a new theatre production, or moving house. This year, in the space between seasons, I have a different learning goal in mind. I want to unlearn what I know how to do. More specifically, I want to unlearn keeping as quiet about my experiences and stories, and begin to descend a bit deeper in my writing into the internal landscape in which I make my home. I want to cultivate the courage to be even more honest about my lived experiences. I desire to know what it’s like to own my stories not without shame showing up, but despite its presence.
You see, growing up, I loved to write, tell, and act out stories of all kinds (though admittedly Little Women, The Secret Garden, Nancy Drew, and any movie set in California were the greatest hits). When it came to telling personal stories, it felt a little more intimidating to share these with others. In many ways, it still does. Part of the reason for my holding back on owning and sharing my own stories in a deeper way may be attributed to my natural introversion and shyness, but my knowing tells me that so much of my hesitancy stems from something one of the grown-ups in my life told me when I was a child; something that my own brain repeats even now.
“No one needs to know our business.”
By “our” business, I mean “family” business, which often, and inconveniently, included “my” business. Reflecting back on that time, my experience of storytelling as a young person was one defined by enmeshment. In my very large family, there were very few boundaries between my own need to share my feelings and thoughts with others outside the family, and my family’s desire for all of us to stay silent about certain stories that they feared would cause them to feel pain and shame if they were spoken aloud. Experiences of mine that occurred (and still do) within or were connected to a larger familial context were out of bounds to share. In the family culture that I grew up in, you didn’t share stories that might reflect “badly” on anyone in the family, even when it meant ignoring, downplaying, or stuffing down your own Big Feelings that were tangled up in larger family scenarios, begging to be expressed. Some of the stories that got stuffed into boxes were intense and complicated. All of the stories were simply human experiences that shame convinced our family were not suitable to share with others, lest we be judged. Over the years, this has felt akin to possessing a metaphorical mansion that contained within it all my experiences, feelings, thoughts, desires, needs, and hard won bits of wisdom, but never being able to walk through the rooms because someone else possesses the keys to the front door.
Many times in the past, when I felt the urge to share what I deeply wanted and needed to express (and still do), I realized that I would, to some degree, need to disclose portions of the larger family stories that we (my family) have tried so desperately to keep wrapped up. Hidden. Tidy. In reality, these larger narratives were huge, messy as hell, thorny, provocative, and true, but ultimately they were forced into boxes in the crawl space of our metaphorical house. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Realizing that I feel this way about the larger family culture I was raised in makes me nearly certain that others in my family also felt this way. In light of this, I want to speak more stories into being not only for the sake of myself, but for the sake of everyone who came before me who felt they could not allow themselves to speak their story too loudly. In a culture where feeling free to share uncomfortable truths is forbidden, everyone suffers. How many feelings went unacknowledged, uncared for, unresolved? By the same token, what kind of freedom, healing, and transformation is possible when we decide to stop staying silent?
When we hold our tongues for long enough, we begin to believe that doing so is not simply a family cultural tradition, but a cosmic decree. We fear being struck by lightning lest we speak openly about the experiences that have shaped us and give these words room to breathe.
I cannot imagine that I’m alone in this family phenomena and the desire to break free from it, and yet, it’s astounding how isolating this belief can be. When we adhere to this vow of story silence in the name of preserving the perceptions of others, we end up stifling our own reflections, peacemaking, and growth. We involuntarily give power to what Buddhist teacher Tara Brach calls the trance of unworthiness, in which we live our lives feeling less than, and separate from, community. Sadly, it is often the most human of experiences that we work hardest to hide. When we don’t normalize the human experience and speak it aloud, it is then that we do indeed fall into the trance and sense that we are living life in some parallel realm, banished from everyone else. In this realm, we are the only person in the world who feels depressed, hopeless, fraudulent, frightened, etc. I have long paid rent to this tradition of not sharing as deeply as I feel drawn to do in the name of loyalty and respect, but recently the price for abandoning my own stories has become too high a cost to continue paying.
Nowadays, it’s less someone else telling me I shouldn’t share too much, and much more my own brain and heart that hesitate to go to places that scare me. The places that also hold the keys to feeling more and more free, word by word by word. Of course, I have no desire to write and share my stories in a way that purposefully (or even unintentionally) harms others that I deeply love and respect. I don’t want to do it to punish or provoke or push anyone or anything into the spotlight without their consent.
And yet.
“No one needs to know our business” is now less about sharing the experiences that are both “mine” and “ours” in a family sense and more of a self-censoring I do with myself.
Melissa: Perhaps I’ll share my experience of living with depression and OCD?
Self-Censor: Melissa, no one needs to know our business.
When I think of my favorite writers (in any form), I experience human beings who speak truth. The truth they share has helped to set me free. I wonder if I might help set someone else free by writing more of my truth. Even when - especially when - it’s not pretty or particularly polished. I’ve been writing online for ten years this fall, and while I celebrate the vulnerability and authenticity of what it is that I have shared, I am ready to take on the role of emotional archeologist and dig even more deeply into the depths of my internal landscape and behold what I find there with breath and grace and honesty.
I am curious about how much of the anxiety and autoimmune symptoms I experience are caused or exacerbated by the stories that are locked inside, forbidden to share.
I want to know what it’s like to simultaneously hold compassion for family cultures where shame and fear of judgement have their hands on the wheel and embrace the courage to start sharing more stories that have shaped who I am becoming.
I’m determined to untangle the “my” from the “our”, and I am deeply curious about how feeling some of the feelings that are buried inside, waiting to be felt and released, might allow me to own and integrate the experiences that have brought me to this moment.
I possess a strong desire to share some of these feelings with others, in an attempt to offer validation and camaraderie to both myself and to others. I don’t want to die having never truly owned my stories, having not had the courage to excavate them and tell them aloud.
Learning something new takes time and unlearning something familiar requires even more. If nothing else, I am a lifelong student: imperfect and squirmy when it comes to sitting in my seat for very long AND relentless and stubborn and hopeful about what I might discover when I wander away from the shallows.
Friends, whether you are similarly called to start sharing more of your truth aloud or whether you choose to briefly glimpse beneath the surface of yourself from time to time, simply silently noticing and naming what’s there, I send all my good wishes for a satisfying expedition as you embark on a new school year. You might not be able to see all of us there in the depths with you, but take heart in knowing we will all congregate on the shore when the dive is done, soaked through, breathing deeply, spent, but glad that we went into the water in the first place.
What are you experiencing in this sacred seasonal gap? What are you going to start to unlearn this fall?