Rising Rooted

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Before I dive in, I need to name the person whose teachings have shaped my entire dark season this year: Natalie Rousseau of Living Ritual.

Natalie is a therapist, witch, and creator of some of the most beautifully invitational seasonal programs I’ve ever taken. Her work has been a quiet lifeline for me — a gentle permission slip to stop trying to outrun the dark and instead lean into the medicine within it. If seasonal living calls to you, her programs are an incredible place to land.

Samhain to Yule: The Season of Descent

This winter — this very specific stretch of time from Samhain to Yule — has a different quality than the rest of the Wheel of the Year. It is the season of descent, of the Sun King’s death, and the rise of the Crone.

The way I picture it is simple and visceral:

The Sun King, who rules the months of growth and outward expansion, grows weaker as the days shorten. He represents that bright, masculine building energy — the energy our culture is obsessed with. The endless hustle. The optimization. The belief that more is always better.

But winter has other plans.

At Samhain, the Sun King dies.

And the Mother — who has been mother, partner, and holder of life — steps over the threshold into her Crone phase. This is not the Crone as caricature, but the Crone as keeper of endings, steward of decay, midwife of the in-between. Her season is not fertile. It is barren, fallow, stripped to the bone.

This is the part of the wheel modern culture tries to skip.

We want rebirth without death. Growth without rest. Bloom without compost. Clarity without the murk.

But nature doesn’t work like that.

And neither do we.

Dhumavati: The Smoky One and the Medicine of Letting Go

The goddess who has been walking with me most closely this season is Dhumavati, the Widow Goddess (from the Shakta Tantric tradition of Hinduism)— an archetype I came to through Natalie’s teachings and have been sitting with daily.

Dhumavati is called The Smoky One: the goddess of endings, disappointment, decay, release. She is the only goddess in her pantheon who is neither wife nor mother. Her power comes not from accumulation, but from emptiness — from the wisdom that can only arrive when everything else has fallen away.

Her lessons cannot be achieved. They can only be surrendered to.

She teaches through the rot. Through the compost.

Through the uncomfortable, unproductive, uncertain void where you cannot force clarity, cannot speed through grief, cannot “optimize” your wintering.

This year — for the first time in my life — I’m actually embracing this.

I keep calling it my “healthy rot.”

Not collapse. Not dissociation. But composting — the intentional loosening of what no longer needs to be carried, so something truer can emerge in its own time.

For me, that has looked like:

• ruthlessly cutting down my to-do list
• saying no more often than yes
• staying with the emotions and sensations of the day rather than planning five months out
• tending my home and my relationships first
• journaling not about where I’m going, but where I am
• letting my energy be low without trying to fix it
• resisting the urge to “prepare for rebirth” prematurely

Dhumavati is teaching me that concealment is not avoidance — it’s a season.

A sacred one.

One that capitalist timekeeping simply refuses to acknowledge.

Why This Season Feels “Wrong” (It’s Not You — It’s Capitalism)

Let’s just say it plainly:

This is a feminine season in a culture that only values the masculine.

We live in colonial, extractive systems that expect linear output 12 months a year. The rhythms of winter — stillness, barrenness, inwardness, less productivity — sit in the cultural shadow. We’re told to keep grinding through the snow, keep buying, keep planning, keep achieving.

Of course you feel like you’re “failing” this time of year. Of course you feel off-kilter.

Your biology, your psyche, your ancestral rhythms are saying one thing — while your inbox, your job, the holiday machine, and the general noise of modern life are screaming something else.

This is not a personal failing. This is a systemic mismatch. And I want to explicitly normalize releasing some of the pressure valves right now:

• holiday performance
• productivity guilt
• endless goal-setting
• the pressure to “finish the year strong”
• parenting shoulds
• housework perfection
• social obligations
• the belief that every moment must be meaningful or efficient

Now, let me make myself clear here: You don’t have to be a seasonal monk. You don’t have to burn your planner. You don’t have to relocate to a forest cottage (although, listen… tempting).

This season is about doing less, not doing winter “right.”

Death Is Not the Same as Rebirth

Something I’m noticing — in myself and in many others — is this impulse to skip straight to renewal.

To use the dark season as “prep for January.” To treat the rot as a strategy.

But nature doesn’t do that. When the plant dies back, it doesn’t sit there strategizing its Q1 goals. It doesn’t visualise its next bloom.

Death is its own phase. Rebirth is a separate one. They are not a two-for-one special.

The compost needs time. The psyche needs time. Your inner world needs time. When we force the rebirth before the death is done, we end up carrying the same old patterns into the next cycle.

This is why the barren landscape matters. It is not a pause before productivity.

It is the medicine.

Simple Dark-Season Rhythms (That Don’t Add More Work)

This is not the season to reinvent your routine. It’s the season to make the mundane magical and the basic sacred.

Some simple winter rhythms:

• Cook nourishing, simple, heavy foods.
  • Beans. Soups. Stews. Roasted roots.
  • Nothing fancy. Nothing Pinterest-worthy. Just warm food that holds you.
• Let your to-do list shrink.
  • Pick the essentials.
  • Cross out the rest.
  • Maintenance > momentum.
• Slow down the mundane.
  • Notice the steam rising from the dishwater; The sound of boots on snow; The way the house feels at 4 p.m. when the light slips away. These are rituals too.
• Sit with yourself.
  • Look out a window.
  • Drink tea in the dark.
  • Do a 5-minute check-in with your body.
  • Let the quiet be the point.
• Tend your home and your kin.
  • Not in some Instagram-homemaker way — just in the “let’s keep each other warm through winter” way.
  • Humans have always done this.
• Dream work
  • Before sleep, ask your dreams a question.
  • Keep a small notebook beside the bed.
  • Write a few words in the morning — even fragments.
  • Don’t rush to make sense of them. Just notice what symbols keep showing up.
• Divination (if it calls you).
  • Tarot. Runes. Pull one card for the day.
  • Not for answers — for reflection.

Returning to Myself in the Dark

This dark season, I’ve been moving differently. Slower. More inward. More honest.

I’ve been sitting with Dhumavati through meditation and through tarot. I’ve been letting myself feel the rot — the healthy rot that comes from letting the unnecessary die back.

I’ve been accepting that I don’t know what January will hold, and resisting the urge to force direction.

There’s insight here in the dark season. Tiny shoots of new awareness pushing up through the compost. But I’m not harvesting them yet.

That’s for later. That’s for the light’s return.

A Permission Slip for the Barren Months

If you’re reading this and feeling behind, exhausted, foggy, directionless — you’re not doing winter wrong. You’re doing it exactly right.

This season is supposed to feel slow. It’s supposed to feel heavy. It’s supposed to feel like a bit of a cosmic exhale you can’t quite articulate.

Let the rot be rot. Let the compost do its work. Let yourself be a person, not a project.

You don’t need to improve yourself right now. You just need to take care of who you are today.

The light will return at Yule. It always does.

But for now?

Rest. Soften. Sink.

Let the season hold you.

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If this spoke to something in you, there are a few paths you can follow from here:

Each door leads somewhere different. It is my hope that all of them lead back to you.

<3 Rachel