Greetings to all my precious people!
There’s a particular quality to these first days of September — nothing dramatic yet, nothing you could point to and say there, that’s the change. Just a cooler edge to the morning air. A slant of light that wasn’t there last week. Somewhere overhead, geese are beginning to practice their formation, long before they actually need it.
We are standing at a threshold. And thresholds ask something of us that the wide-open seasons don’t: they ask us to trust a turning we cannot yet fully see.
According to Chinese Medicine, we are in a distinct Fifth Season right now — the transition between the Yang of Summer and the emerging Yin of Autumn. It’s governed by the Earth element: harvest, balance, grounding, the alchemy of transforming what we’ve gathered into something that can actually nourish us. The Spleen and Stomach hold this season’s wisdom, quietly doing the work of turning what comes in into what sustains us.
As the grip of summer loosens — the days shortening almost apologetically now — it feels like more than the season itself let go this year. In these same two weeks, we lost Dolly Parton, Wendell Berry, and Gloria Steinem. Three very different lives, but the same undercurrent running beneath all of them: none of the three treated their days as something to simply get through. They spent them, deliberately, on a community they cared about — with humor, with land, with a stubborn insistence on dignity and parity for people who had less power than they did. They made noise when noise was needed, and did the quieter work too, and they did both without ever asking to be admired for it.
If their example asks anything of us, it isn’t grief — it’s the question underneath it: given that none of us have an unlimited number of these seasons, what are we doing with the hours we spend on worry, on anxiety, on outside noise, that could instead go toward the instincts already quietly waiting inside us?
Here is how you begin to trust the turning — in your body, today:
The Earth element responds beautifully to scents that are grounding, sweet, warm, or woody — the kind that help clear dampness, strengthen the Spleen, and settle a restless mind:
- Ginger — warms the middle, eases bloating and fatigue
- Sweet Orange — lifts heavy energy, clears brain fog
- Patchouli — for when you feel physically or emotionally “stuck”
- Vetiver — quiets racing thoughts and chronic overthinking
- Cedarwood — builds a felt sense of safety and inner stability
Diffuser blend: 3 drops Sweet Orange, 2 drops Patchouli, 1 drop Ginger — lovely during Qi Gong or any quiet morning practice.
Foot bath: 2 drops Vetiver, 3 drops Cedarwood in Epsom salts, before bed, to draw an overactive mind back down into a tired body.
A short grounding practice for the turning:
Sit. Feet flat on the floor, hands resting below your navel. Feel the places where your body meets the earth — notice how completely it holds you, without any effort on your part.
Breathe in through your nose, low into the belly. Breathe out through your mouth, letting the shoulders drop.
Breathe in nourishment. Breathe out worry.
Picture a warm golden light in your digestive center, spreading outward until it wraps around you like a blanket. Quietly repeat:
I am safely grounded in this present moment.
I release the need to overthink and trust the natural flow of life.
My mind is clear, and my body is nourished.
Wiggle your fingers and toes. Rub your palms together, cup them over your closed eyes. Open them slowly.
This is the doorway I want to walk through with you this Autumn — through the Equinox, and all the way into Samhain — as we practice something I’m calling Surrender into Certainty. Not the certainty of having answers. The certainty nature has always modeled for us: the bloom, the migration, the turning of the leaves, all of it arriving right on time, without needing our permission or our worry to make it so.
We can’t see the whole turning yet. But we can trust it. One breath, one small grounded moment, at a time.
