Summer has arrived in full force here in my household and on the land I tend.  The peonies are showing off in the front garden, waving heavily in the Atlantic wind.  My annual harvest of beach roses is drying – a small one this year, on account of bad timing, an intolerable amount of mosquitoes and an impatient puppy.  The little patch of sage I transplanted in the Spring is loving its new home, proliferating like I’ve never seen sage proliferate.  My herbal medicine teacher always says that the plants we need the most make themselves known to us, and so I’m guessing sage is here to help me with the night sweats and mood swings that have dominated my perimenopause experience – or maybe she’s portending hot flashes to come?  At any rate, I will be harvesting gratefully and enjoying the woodsy waft of sage and its cooling effects every time I make my herbal tea for the whole year, it looks like.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles and seasons this year.  I mean, I always think a lot about cycles and seasons, but my apprenticeship to the iterative fluctuation of all things has taken on a new depth in recent months.

I think there are a few reasons for this heightened awareness.  It’s definitely because my household now contains two cycling females at either end of the menstrual journey.  Those bookend times are intense and unpredictable, and it’s tremendously reassuring to contextualize our experiences with a knowing glance and “I think it’s Day 23, isn’t it?”

It’s also in no small part because we’ve just gone through a really challenging season as a family, and we know that there will be more to come.  Holding the long perspective – remembering in our bones that this too shall pass, but without all the placative energy – has been a necessary balm.

I think I had a bit of a break-up with this way of thinking for a long time, worried that I was bypassing, or that I was not being empathetic enough with my clients when I gently reminded them that maybe things would change, that maybe this was for now, not forever.  But now I think of myself as the one holding that long view like a treasure in my palms for them when all they can see is what’s crumbling around their feet.  And the Earth holds the long view for me in the same way:  sometimes every footstep of my morning walk is an incantation of both hope and knowing that “Spring will come, Spring will come, Spring will come.”

Cycles and seasons have been a central theme in my conversation with my clients these days.  My current client load (what’s a better word than “load” – if they’re a load, it’s one I delight in carrying; I’ve got a great backpack) are mostly navigating new motherhood, perimenopause or….both.  Somebody needs to write a book on that increasingly-common BOTH experience.  Dang.  But I digress.  I find that supporting them to make meaning of their experiences just doesn’t make sense without locating them seasonally and cyclically.

That means that we might be having a conversation about the frustrations of career challenges, but anchored with the reminder that, in the first 2-3 years of motherhood, you’re growing an entirely new identity and have probably had daycare-induced pink-eye 78% of the time (no, just me?), and that the ability to make career changes or goals will feel more possible, in time.

The same goes for a perimenopausal client who shows up in session feeling like she’s gonna set her life on fire.  It just feels prudent to ask what day of her cycle she’s on, and if she tends to feel this way at this time every month.  That way I know, as her coach, if I should, you know, metaphorically get the matches, or if it’s maybe a better idea to help her find some strategies to navigate this time of the month with a bit more equanimity.

It’s not that we don’t still address the challenges and explore how to move through them, but we do so with the knowledge that the current cycle or season may be playing a meaningful role in what’s happening and that it will, by definition, change.

When we’re going through difficult times, it’s actually beautifully adaptive to focus on the challenge at hand.  We learned to do that in our don’t-get-eaten-by-a-sabretooth-tiger days, when the prospect of one threat caused us to narrow our perspective and hyper-fixate on anything that could cause threat.  The downside is that this happened – and still happens – to the detriment of our ability to see nourishment, beauty, and the possibility that this too shall pass.

It’s a perspective that is filled with compassion and reassurance.  When I locate myself within the season of my month, year and life, there’s a part of me that softens and whispers:  “Ah, honey, how you’re feeling make so much sense.”

And so with that I wonder:  what season of your life are you in right now?  Are you in Day 23 Season, or Summer Season, or Matrescence or Perimenopause or Newly Diagnosed or Divorced or Retired Season?  Can you make a little more sense of your experience – and have a little more compassion for yourself – when you think of it this way?

As for me, I’m with the peonies – heavy with the richness of Summer and full of colour and flash as well as the knowing that Fall will come, and I’ll need a good harvest of the sweetness of this time to get me through.

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