Weekly frameworks and practices to help you take meaningful action in impactful and sustainable ways.
Entering the December Season of Frenzy: The Wednesday 1-2-3
Happy Wednesday Reader!
Here's 1 teaching, 2 questions, and 3 resources to explore this week:
1. Teaching
An interesting thing happens in the United States when we cross the calendar threshold of Thanksgiving.
We enter the unofficial season of Frenzy.
Beginning with Thanksgiving, we pack this time of year with loud and outgoing festivities: Black Friday, tree lightings, visits to outdoor malls blasting Mariah Carey, the Christmas holiday itself (often filled with people and yearly rituals), and then we cap it with the raucous New Year celebration.
All with the steady drumbeat of "buy-buy-buy" texturing the energetic soundtrack of the season.
But if we pause, we might notice something else happening: nature all around us is constricting and pulling in, protecting and quieting down.
In this context, it makes sense so many of us feel frazzled and anxious during this season of Frenzy.
Because we, too, are a part of nature, also made cold by the wind and in need of holding ourselves close.
And yet, we've manufactured a season of busyness, social obligations, and energetic outflow, disconnecting ourselves from the softness of our animal bodies.
There is a tension in this – in striving to keep pace with the season of Frenzy while our bodies yearn for slow movement, quiet evenings, and the soft glow of warm fires.
2. Questions
- What is this time of year like for you? How does this tension, if present for you, show up in your body?
- How were you taught to see yourself as separate and distinct from "the natural world?" What experiences do you have that have broken down or challenged this sense of separateness?
3. Resources
- Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (book)
- "Are humans animals?" (article)
- The Overstory by Richard Powers (book)
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Sending you good vibes,
Andrew
The Gentle Change Newsletter
Weekly frameworks and practices to help you take meaningful action in impactful and sustainable ways.
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