March 23, 2022
Hello From the Other Side
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Somewhere in the quiet, dark time between the winter solstice and the turn of the calendar year from 2021 to 2022, I discovered something deeper about my love of ritual and ceremony. There, in the days of darkness with returning light, I saw how connecting with nature and pulling ritual and ceremony closer are my terra firma in uncharted terrain and tumult. I understood that this is how I befriend life when it comes at me hard. I witnessed how hard times fire an instinct in me to recruit new rituals and ceremonies and how in the hardest of times I reclaim ones from my past and my ancestry.
The instinct to turn uncertainty into ceremony and use nature to nourish my spirit is primal in me; I believe it is for all us, that it has become embedded in our deepest human coding over time. Those who came before us used ritual and ceremony and community to navigate being human in their times. For me, there is great comfort in knowing that. When I feel a soul-tug that feels out of nowhere, I’m learning that it is the exact opposite – it is emerging from somewhere beyond my here and now, from a place bigger than what I understand about myself. And so I’ve followed the tug to dive into my Scottish ancestry, and found a land and culture that feel like home. I’ve reached for the rituals of my ancestor’s Catholic roots to bring me strength and peace.
All of this is a mystery to me, but my practice today is to listen to and honor the tugs. I do this because it’s how I connect with steadiness, consolation, safety, and community when any (and sometimes all) of those senses feel under siege. And although I have learned and turned to rituals and practices to find sense-making amidst senselessness throughout my life, my instinct for doing this almost remained unobserved by me until this past winter.
There, in the days of darkness with returning light, I saw how connecting with nature and pulling ritual and ceremony closer are my terra firma in uncharted terrain and tumult.
Interestingly (and, I guess, not surprisingly), it was one of my new seasonal practices that brought this new insight into my awareness. In the past couple of years I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for the season of winter and incorporated practices of “wintering.” Wintering is a concept I learned from a writer-teacher of mine and further explored in Katherine May’s beautiful book Wintering. As someone who feels most alive practicing human heliotropism in the presence of the sun, winters in my bioregion have often meant for me seasonal depression and plugging in a lightbox version of sunlight at my desk until the spring breaks through.
For three winters now, I’ve called Winter a new friend. Another writer, thinker, and activist who teaches me so much is Lynne Twist. In her book The Soul of Money, Lynne writes “What you appreciate appreciates…Appreciation is the beating heart of sufficiency.” I can’t say exactly what shifted my relationship with Winter, but I know this: when I learned how to focus on appreciating it, on trusting I could be sustained and nourished in it (which was so hard for me), and on celebrating it as one of nature’s great works of art, me and Winter had lift-off in our new befriending. Practicing appreciation of my former seasonal antagonist led me to practices that placed me into alignment and ally-ship with it.
All of this has everything to do with my work life. I bring in rituals and practices to support this business I have created and nurtured for eight years now, including the concept of business seasons and ways to mark them. I’ve incorporated “wintering” business practices to align our energies and our workflow with the slower, darker, quieter, more reflective time outside our windows. Winter’s approach is our signal to begin winding down the work of the year. Mid-December signals the start of the winter holiday season, when our company takes a true and restorative break from work to be with our families and loved ones. We make it a priority to enter the new year rested and centered. We use the opening of the new year to individually and collectively reflect backward, vision forward, plan, and prepare.
I bring in rituals and practices to support this business I have created and nurtured for eight years now, including the concept of business seasons and ways to mark them.
In late winter as the snowdrops here are pushing through cold earth and the monarch butterflies in Mexico are stirring northward as they prepare to migrate, our team moves into building and creating mode. Around this time, I practice the annual ritual of co-creating (with my project manager Jes) and sending a gratitude card to my team and community of clients and partners. This is one way I show my appreciation to the people who have supported Asana Consulting since its start – I hand address and mail an actual card for each one to have and hold. For 2022, there was simply nowhere else to go but to Love. Here at Asana Consulting, we’re forever-long on love: it’s the top of the list of the values we stand for. Love is our what, how, and why. It’s the heart of our origins, our daily work, our interactions with each other and clients, and our vision for the future. And so it happened that one of my first signs of spring this year were the texts and emails from people in our community holding the card, showing it displayed in a special spot, and saying it sparked a happy burst of love.
Here we are at another moment of seasonal alignment, in the passage between winter and spring in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s so much to love about the seasonal turn to spring! With the spring equinox, the emergence of a “springing” energy is felt in the quality of light and visible growth outdoors. I feel it internally, too. And as it turns out, the start of spring 2022 was Asana Consulting’s 8th birthday! That’s right – in a moment of awesome yet totally unintended seasonal alignment, I birthed Asana Consulting on the spring equinox, March 20, 2014, and so we celebrate coming into a new year of growth in all forms here at Asana Consulting in sync with our whole earth community.
Today I’m wearing my forsythia yellow sweater, a celebratory spring ritual of sorts to celebrate the fierceness of spring seeds that push up through the soil, the arrival of new growth, the return of the sun and the color party out my windows.
Wearing this sweater has become a personal ceremonial act for when I need to refresh my orientation towards hope at this epic time of humanity. It connects me to the experience of witnessing Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in history, who recited her masterpiece “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 Inauguration ceremony while standing in the sunlight on the steps of The Capitol wearing a bright yellow jacket mere days after the terror of the insurrection landed there. It connects me to reading and writing poetry, a lifelong literary ceremony for me.
-Amanda Gorman , “The Hill We Climb”
Here’s to the many forms of comfort and hope in us and around us all as we journey forward.
Nancy is a Baltimore native who came to communications and marketing through her work in public health. In 2014 she took an entrepreneurial leap of faith to start Asana Consulting and she found her wings.
