Why I Began Through the Seasons
Growth sometimes looks like dividing things so they have new space to grow
The water lapped along the shore on a cool autumn morning where the seasons collided. The still-warm water from summer sat settled and calm as the freshly cooled air floated over to make the fogs we know well during the between seasons in northern Michigan’s lake-filled landscape. The autumn air allowed my breath to come alive in visible puffs of air, even though it wasn’t cool enough for a coat. With every rise and fall of my breath, I saw each tangibly outside my body in small clouds. Overhead the birds sang the songs they only sing when the seasons shift, like sad love songs of gratitude to the Earth.
A 7-month-old baby snuggled in against my chest as the fog rose, and he finally felt at ease for the first time all night. The night had been long with a bad case of croup that shook this first-time mother, unaware that this could happen without it meaning a trip to the ER. Instead, a kind nurse-on-call talked me through all the things to do, and she said the best would be to bundle up and head out into the cold air. She spoke the words, “Nature sometimes can be our best medicine.” Standing now in the blue light of the earliest glimpse of the sunrise with the dew hanging and dancing on the now golden grasses and tinged leaves of the sumac, I heard her words again echo in my head - “Nature sometimes can be our best medicine….”
We had just returned back to Michigan to live here full-time. Something I never thought I would do, after all, winter isn’t my thing (or so I thought), but sometimes when we become parents, the things we never expected become reality. As that baby dozed off listening to the beating of my heart, the cool air raised the hairs on my arms and neck as the fog rolled over the still-warm water of Lake Michigan.
We had rented a tiny farmhouse that was our friends’. It had welcomed them back to this magical place at one point, and now it was doing the same for us. The creaky floors of the old farmhouse were just a skip away from the lakeshore. I hadn’t lived this close to the lake since I was a child. The smells of being that close to the water were familiar. Every morning I was rushed back to a white house on Crooked Lake just outside Petoskey, Michigan, to the dewiest memories of willow trees, docks, and the sound of loons waking me with the sunrise would come to life in golden light. The memories would remind me just why they had been etched into me as warm feelings would fill me in ways I hadn’t felt in a long time. Once again, the warmth of those memories was like a balm to my exhausted self who needed to be reminded life is never permanent.
Wandering the lakeshore listening to my son’s rising and falling that had calmed in the cool air, I felt held in a way I didn’t know I needed. I had been feeling ungrounded, lost, questioning, and working hard to learn this new role. The moment I became pregnant, I felt everything begin to change and not just my body. A change I wanted but also could never have prepared for at the same time. It was the first time I knew I would never be able to return to who I had been before. At the time, that felt scary.
Motherhood came upon me in every way I expected and didn’t. When I birthed my son, I also birthed a new version of myself. I felt as new to the world as he did, yet I was caring for him and not sure how to care for this raw new self I had become. I wasn’t alone in this journey, but I didn’t know how to ask for help the way he did. That concept felt foreign to me as such an independent and introverted person. The basics of life felt hard even 7 months into this new way of living, but maybe that’s when it really hits us as new moms. I am not sure.
My career felt like it had fallen through the cracks. I no longer felt my work aligned with the new self I was now trying to learn. I was struggling to be a good partner in my marriage. I was coming out of PPD and didn’t realize it yet. So much felt hard, like running in quicksand, and nothing felt familiar to me.
Here though, on the shore of the perfectly still morning, the water lapped my finest childhood memories to me…I realized for the first time it could also hold us in our worst just as well. I saw in the water something I had not realized I was missing…nature…home…these wild places that were written on the DNA I now had given to my son.
That morning as the sun rose and the Canadian Geese flew through the fog and honked at one another, I realized just how far I had moved away physically and spiritually from this landscape. How far I had moved from the sounds and smells that made me feel at home in every sense of the word. Even though right then I was deep in being “home” and back in northern Michigan, I didn’t realize just how far I had come from the child who swam in these waters. I didn’t realize how I had forgotten how at peace I felt with my feet bare in the sand, smelling the damp forest in spring, or even how snow brought a necessary and important silence.
At that time, when I was at my most exhausted, I realized then I was beginning a journey of coming back home to this place but also to myself. This journey would only happen by shifting my whole life back to paying attention and being present with nature. The very thing that held me as a young child who was wrestling with the grief she felt from losing her grandfather, the anxiety of separation, grappling with loneliness, what it meant to lose your sense of place, and how to learn a new culture in a very different place from your old one.
The same child who found solace in the way the water moved and how it felt for a fish to catch her line.
The same child who preferred to feel the grass beneath her feet because it made her feel alive.
The same child who spent many days wrestling with what it means to have such intense emotions while sitting and listening to the birds.
The same child that learned the very power of the garden from the grandfather who slipped away too soon.
The same child who felt far more comfortable amongst the trees and moss than being in a classroom where words and numbers felt challenging.
As I took a few steps from the lake and started turning home…I realized I was doing the same in myself. That day everything shifted for me. I began a journey of understanding seasons in a deep way that went beyond the rhythms and towards seeing them as gifts to teach us how to understand the experiences we will have being human throughout our life. I began the long and tedious journey to learning the land we had taken responsibility for on a hill in Leelanau County, where a new life would unfold in the coming years. I would soon watch as it came back to life right alongside me. I stepped that day towards a road of finding my place no longer existed separate from nature but as one of the many parts of nature. This soon would become my life calling that would influence every single choice from there on. Not perfectly, but in a way that began healing a lost relationship, closing the space between nature and me and, ultimately myself.
For years, I have blogged on Fresh Exchange, and when blogging changed, I turned to Instagram to share and write my journey of discovery, but that didn’t work either. So much of what I have learned over these years of turning home has unfolded in ways that never could be translated properly anywhere but in more long-form writing. Writing has been and always will be the best way I communicate what unfolds through this journey of self-discovery and falling in love with the soil under me again.
As Fresh Exchange has grown to be focused so heavily on helping others build confidence in the garden in the way I have, I have found that my writing needs to live and breathe on its own. This means it needs its own garden box now…so here we are.
I have learned that growth isn’t always about moving up but sometimes about dividing and separating into new spaces. Creating this newsletter and sharing my writing, journey, and lessons here feels like doing just that. It’s time for me to bring my writing into its own space so I can tell a story that really hasn’t had the place to be told properly, and I am excited about where it will go.
Writing now on a blog for over 12 years has grown me as a writer especially considering I was diagnosed my freshman year in college with Dyslexia (a story for another day). It’s been a journey to feel confident to say I am a writer. I love writing. I always live in phrases and essays in my head. I have pages of things that come in every situation in my life, whether driving my kids to school and seeing a perfect sunrise in February, weeding the garden and cursing the quack grass, cooking dinner from what we grew, or just sitting and watching the sunset over the hills on this land that now is home in ways I never knew land could be. There are lessons that unfold; typically, they align with healing and learning to have patience with myself, but they always arrive from turning to nature and listening.
Mary Oliver wrote in Upstream, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” That short sentence is my daily reminder of how we start any relationship, but it is most important in creating a meaningful and life-changing relationship with the very thing that is our home: Earth. The soil and the plants don’t speak in a way we hear easily as humans, but the more I pay attention, the more I have learned to hear their truths and lessons that have helped me be the person I am and will continue to become.
In a world where we are witnessing the dramatic effects of climate change, it can feel like we as individuals are insignificant in the grand scheme, but I believe falling in love and tending the earth in a way that heals our relationship with it is the greatest way to shift the course we are on on the individual level. I have watched it unfold now for 5 years on our land, and I have no doubt it can be done on a larger scale amongst us all. After all, how can we save something we don’t love or see as intrinsically connected to our existence?
My hope is that sharing here will inspire you to find your way to begin Turning Home too. To find your way back to the place you came from…the place we all have come from; nature. I believe wholeheartedly that when we pay attention to nature and, in turn, ourselves, not only will we begin to find deeper meaning in our lives, but it will also be how we learn to love the earth in a new way and ultimately give it the space it needs to heal.
I have felt for a long time I wanted to begin this space, and I am excited to pen these first words here. Doing so in spring also feels incredibly right as well. So, I am glad you are here to begin this adventure with me too.