Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash
“It is always important to know when something has reached its end.
Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters…
what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”
~~ Paulo Coelho
Greetings to all my precious people, my fellow travelers,
You’ve been standing at doorways for three weeks now. This week, we walk through one.
Overhead, the geese aren’t practicing formation anymore. They’re gone — or going. Nobody called a meeting. No committee reviewed the data on when, exactly, to leave. Something in them simply knew, the way it has known for longer than any of our calendars have existed, and they went.
I want to be honest about something most migration stories skip past: knowing when to leave and knowing where to go are not the same knowing. Geese have both, wired in together. We rarely get both at once. Usually we get the first — a restlessness, a door that’s suddenly, undeniably closed, a chapter that has plainly ended even if we can’t yet see the next one’s title. Coelho’s line isn’t really about destinations. It’s about having the courage to close the circle before you know what the next one looks like.
The Celts had their own name for travelers like this: the “Wild Geese” — the term given, centuries later, to those who left Ireland for uncertain shores, carrying home with them rather than leaving it fully behind. And in the old myths, birds themselves were messengers between worlds — the swan children of Lir, transformed and set flying, not as punishment but as a passage they had to fly through before they could become themselves again fully.
This is where I want to name something plainly: you are the hero of this story. I am simply your guide. Not because I have the map — none of us fully do — but because I’ve walked enough of my own dark corners, faced enough of my own leavings, to know the terrain a little, and to walk beside you while you find your own way through it. A good midwife doesn’t have the baby. She knows the process, and she trusts the one doing the actual work.
In Chinese Medicine, this kind of decisive, forward motion belongs to the Wood element and the Liver — even here, deep in Metal’s season of release, we borrow Wood’s particular gift: the Hun, the ethereal soul said to govern vision, direction, and the capacity to know which way is forward. It’s the same faculty that lets a tree, having dropped everything Metal asked it to release, still know exactly which way is up come spring. You are allowed to borrow that gift now, mid-letting-go, if a clear direction is asking to be honored rather than waited out.
Here’s the piece that needs to be clarified: Metal isn’t only the season of releasing gently. Metal is also the blade. In Chinese Medicine, this element governs the Lung and Large Intestine specifically because both organs share one skill — knowing precisely what to keep and what to expel, breath by breath, day by day, without hesitation or second-guessing. That’s not the opposite of indecision. It’s discernment: the capacity to look at something clearly and choose, cleanly, whether it stays or goes.
When Metal falls out of harmony, the body tends to express itself in exactly these two places. A held breath, a tight chest, a stubborn cough that won’t fully clear — that’s often grief with nowhere to go, dammed up rather than moving through. And the Large Intestine’s own language is just as literal: what we can’t let go of emotionally, the body sometimes mirrors physically, in constipation, in bloating, in a gut that won’t release what it’s finished digesting. The Metal element isn’t being poetic when it links breath and elimination to holding on. It’s describing the same mechanism, playing out in two different rooms of the same house.
So — how do you know? How do you actually read the nudge, before it becomes a cough that won’t quit or a decision you’ve been sitting on for months?
You already know how, and you already have proof: the hair that rises on your arms before you consciously register why. The sudden certainty that someone’s eyes are on you, before you turn around. The déjà vu shiver that arrives half a second before your thinking mind catches up. None of that is mystical. It’s your oldest operating system, the one that kept every ancestor you have alive long enough to become an ancestor, still running quietly underneath all your newer, louder thoughts. The geese have only that system. We have it too — we’ve just built decades of noise on top of it.
The nudge to leave usually doesn’t announce itself as loudly as a hair standing on end. More often it’s smaller and stranger: a low hum of restlessness that has no obvious cause. A tightening in the chest at the thought of staying, and a small, unreasonable lightness at the thought of not. A dream that keeps circling the same door. The body rarely uses words. It uses sensation, and it repeats itself patiently until you notice.
This is the practice, then, and it’s a practice you build the same way you’d build any other kind of strength — slowly, with repetition, paying closer attention each time rather than trying to get it right immediately: when you feel something, however small, pause before naming it or explaining it away. Ask only: where in my body is this, exactly? Does it feel like an opening or a closing? A pull toward, or away? You don’t need the full translation on the first try. You just need to start keeping the appointment with your own signals, the way you’d keep any appointment with someone whose voice you’re learning to trust again.
A question, not a task, for this week:
What door has plainly, quietly closed — one you’ve perhaps been standing in front of, waiting for permission to admit it? You don’t need to know where you’re going yet. You only need to know that this one has ended. Let that be enough for now. The direction has a way of revealing itself to those who’ve actually left, far more readily than it ever does to those still waiting at the door for a map.
And a genuine ask:
I don’t want this to be a one-way letter. Hit reply and tell me: what door has closed for you this year — the one you’ve been quietly standing in front of? You don’t need to have the next chapter figured out. I just want to know I’m not the only one migrating.
I’m also building a small circle for exactly this season of leaving and not-yet-knowing — women walking their own thresholds, together, with some actual structure and company for the parts that are hard to do alone. Nothing to sign up for yet. Just: if reading this made something in you sit up a little straighter, tell me. I’m listening for who’s out there.
