The Work of the Waning Season

Milkweed blooming and going to seed in the late-summer garden at Shimmering Ridge Sanctuary.

Creation is winding down. Harvest has its bags packed and is ready to move in.

I can feel it everywhere right now.

Outside, summer hasn't exactly surrendered. The forecast still has plenty of ninety-degree days in it, and the afternoons are quite capable of reminding me that September in North Georgia is not autumn simply because I would like it to be. Apparently, neither my impatience nor the appearance of pumpkin-spice everything has any meaningful influence on the weather.

But the edges are beginning to soften. The mornings are cooler. The light has changed. Here and there, a tree has begun quietly trying on its fall color while the rest of the forest is still dressed for summer.

I can feel the change in myself, too.

For the better part of seven months, I have been in an almost relentless season of creation. Not frantic, exactly. Much of it has been joyful. But enormously generative.

I've written and designed and painted and planted. I've imagined rooms and then watched them emerge from lumber, paint, fabric and an unreasonable number of decisions. I've developed retreats, rituals, gardens, workshops, essays and the beginnings of a book and oracle deck. I've spent countless hours thinking about what this place could become, then considerably more hours figuring out how to make some version of what was in my head exist in the physical world.

Some of those ideas cooperated beautifully.

Others became unknown humpy mountains on a mural that simply refused to submit to any recognizable Appalachian form and eventually had to be wiped out of existence so I could start the whole damn thing again.

Creation is not always graceful.

And lately, I can feel that creative torrent beginning to slow.

A younger version of me might have found that alarming. After all, the tagline for my day in The Big Book of Birthdays is "The Day of Mammoth Projects," which may be the most irritatingly accurate thing anyone has ever said about me. I might have wondered where my drive had gone or tried to kick-start another round of ideas before the last ones had even finished becoming real.

I know better now.

The season is changing.

The Apothecary floor is finished, and instead of imagining what the room might someday look like, I am putting it back together and seeing what has been made. The construction at the front of the house is finally done, and my attention has shifted from concrete, stone, and drainage to the plants waiting to go into the beds.

I cannot adequately express how delightful it is to have reached the part of a construction project where nobody needs me to have an opinion about concrete.

Rooms that existed for months as measurements, fabric samples, and sketches are becoming actual places where actual people will soon sleep. And the kick-off retreat with my Waymakers—once nothing more than an idea—is almost here.

There is a particular pleasure in this stage that creation doesn't offer. Creation is full of possibility. Harvest lets you hold something in your hands.

We tend to think of harvest as the culmination of a growing season, but it isn't really the end. Harvest has its own work.

There is gathering to do. Sorting. Preserving. Finishing what needs finishing. Taking stock of what flourished and what didn't. Enjoying some things immediately and putting others away for later. There is gratitude in it, but there is discernment too.

And while all of that is happening, preparation for winter has already begun.

The natural world understands this without having to put it on a calendar.

The extravagant outward growth of spring and summer cannot continue indefinitely. Plants begin directing their energy elsewhere. Seeds ripen. Leaves prepare to fall. Roots store what they'll need. The forest gradually turns away from expansion and toward conservation.

Nothing has gone wrong; the work has simply changed.

A while ago, as I was planning the annual rhythm of Shimmering Ridge Sanctuary, I deliberately built periods of rest into the calendar. I didn't want retreats and workshops stacked endlessly throughout the year simply because there were empty weekends available. The land needs seasons when it isn't being asked to receive people, and I knew I would too.

Apparently my creative life has been paying attention.

Which is mildly irritating. I prefer my own wisdom when it doesn't circle back around and start giving me instructions.

I'm not ready for winter yet. There is still plenty to gather and finish. My loom is coming, and I am already looking at the ridiculous stash of yarn and fiber waiting to be spun that I've accumulated and wondering what I want to weave first.

Apparently my response to feeling the end of a seven-month creative torrent approaching is to acquire a large wooden apparatus with which I can make entirely different things.

Baby steps.

There are plants to put into the ground, rooms to finish dressing, people I love to spend time with, and the first retreat to welcome into this place.

But I don't feel the same call to generate more.

Right now, I want to tend what has already been created.

I want to walk through these rooms and enjoy them. I want to put my hands into the soil without simultaneously designing the next garden. I want to weave with what I've already gathered. I want to watch women sit around the table that, for so long, existed only in my imagination.

I want to receive the harvest.

There will be another season for making. I know myself well enough to have absolutely no concern about that. If history is any indication, something ridiculous will occur to me eventually.

But perhaps one of the gifts of living more closely with the natural world is remembering that no living thing is meant to remain in a state of constant expansion.

There is a time to imagine and a time to build. A time to grow and a time to gather. A time to preserve what matters and release what doesn't. And eventually, a time to become quiet enough for something new to begin forming beneath the surface.

The work of the waning season is not to force another bloom.

It is to tend what grew.