Autumn is asking you something you may not have put into words yet: What do you keep from this year and what do you let go?
Underneath that question is a fear most people don’t say out loud. Letting go can feel like erasure, like the year gets filed away, lessons and all, as if none of it happened.
Let’s be honest, in some cases you want that. There are things that happened this year that you want to pretend were simply bad dreams, never to be thought of again.
The teacher that found me this week reminds me that there is a better way.
I was reading an article about Bogs. It talked about water, nutrients, and peat moss, one catch-all term standing in for everything growing there. It never named Sphagnum, the moss that actually builds a Bog, or anything else living in that ground. I noticed the reducing before I noticed anything else.
You know how my mind works. It churns on something it cannot yet explain until it finds some shape for it. I am more convinced every year that I am turning into a plant myself, which makes conversation with the humans around me difficult sometimes. So when Bogs found me this way, I kept going.
A Bog is wet, low ground where dead plant matter piles up and barely breaks down. The soil is oxygen-poor, nutrient-poor, more acidic than most ground gets to be. Kin growing there are often heath and heather, rooted straight into that slow, half-rotted peat.
Here is what got me thinking… that rot is exactly why conservation agencies around the world protect Bogs as their own kind of habitat, biodiverse enough to be studied and named on ki’s own terms, built directly out of that rot.
Rot, in water, is useful. Water, in the way I read it, is the fluid part of the Soul, the part that carries feeling and everything underneath thought. Rot in that water is not waste. It is the slow work of turning what has finished into what can still feed something.
So I keep asking myself what I am ready to let rot this season. Not erase, rot. What served me last year, and does not anymore, sitting in the same wet ground as what I still need, breaking down without disappearing.
Most of what gets called healing asks you to forget. Grief does not work that way. Trauma does not either. Given room instead of erasure, they become ground: insight, direction, even the next real step forward can grow out of exactly what you were taught to bury.
Where might the parts of you that won’t fully release finally go, what could they nourish, if you stopped needing them to disappear and let them rot?
I would love to know. Just hit reply.
Vegetal Entanglements,
P.S. If this kind of thinking wants company, this conversation is happening inside our Naturally Conscious Community. See what’s growing there →
