A seasonal way to bring more meaning, rhythm, and soul into ordinary life
Working with the Wheel of the Year can be as simple as seasonal celebrations. A way to say: here we are. It’s spring. It’s the midpoint. The light is returning. The dark is deepening. The leaves are falling. The daffodils are pushing up again.
And honestly, that alone can be beautiful. There is sweetness in marking the solstices and equinoxes, lighting candles, putting flowers on an altar, watching the moon, stepping outside and noticing what the world is doing.
For me, over the past twenty years, working with the Wheel of the Year has also become something steadier: a way of orienting myself. Not Truth with a capital T. Not dogma. Not a system I need anyone else to believe in.
More like a place to hang my hat. A direction to point my arrows. A rhythm I can return to when ordinary life feels scattered, or too linear, or a little deadened by clocks and screens and the general madness of the human world.
More than almost anything else in my life (except perhaps loving and being loved), working with the wheel has been one of the most anchoring practices I know.
It has given me balance, perspective, and a way to feel sane and steady living on this planet, at this time, amidst cultural upheaval and political noise.
Not as an escape. As a way to stay present.
Cyclical Time: Another Way to Understand Your Life
Most of our lives are organized by linear time.
We’re born, we grow up, we achieve, we age, we die. We move forward. We make progress. We try not to fall behind.
That way of understanding time is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
Working with the seasons and the moon invites us into cyclical time: a way of experiencing life that is less about forward momentum and more about return, repetition, and rhythm.
Some people speak of this as kairos time (the ancient Greek word for the opportune, meaningful moment) as distinct from chronos, or chronological time. When we live in closer relationship with cycles and seasons, we create the conditions for more of these moments of alignment to arise. We begin to feel ourselves connected to both meaningful time and clock time. We dip our toes into the stream of as it ever was, and as it ever will be.
In cyclical time, growth doesn’t happen in a straight line. It happens in spirals.
We revisit themes. We circle back. We return changed, not because we “leveled up,” but because something ripened in its own time.
The Wheel as Mirror, Not Decoration
The Wheel of the Year marks the great thresholds of light and dark: solstices, equinoxes, and the turning points in between.
The eight-spoked wheel many of us use now is a modern weaving together of older seasonal observances, not a single ancient calendar handed down intact. I actually appreciate that. It keeps me honest. It reminds me that this is not about pretending certainty where there is mystery.
For me, working the wheel is about attunement… a form of depth work.
The natural world becomes a mirror. Leaves fall, and we feel our own letting go. Daffodils push through frozen soil, and something in us stretches upward too, often before we have language for it.
Long before I knew the phrase “Wheel of the Year,” the land was teaching me. Watching the seasons change. Feeling how different times of year asked different things of me. Learning, slowly, that I am one life form among billions, moving this way, through this season, right now.
I think that sense of right relationship and interconnection matters. Especially times when the outer world of culture seems to have gone mad.
What Working the Wheel Can Actually Look Like
Working with the Wheel of the Year does not have to mean elaborate ritual.
It might mean pausing at winter solstice to ask what kind of darkness you are in, and whether it is asking for rest, grief, quiet, incubation, or something else entirely.
It might mean noticing what begins to stir around Imbolc, before anything has fully arrived.
It might mean asking, in spring, what is genuinely ready to grow (not what you think should be growing because everyone else seems so darn productive).
It might mean letting summer show you what wants to be expressed, shared, embodied, or celebrated.
It might mean allowing autumn to help you sort through what has ripened, what did not grow, what needs gratitude, and what needs to be weeded out.
And it might mean meeting the moon in a similar way: as a smaller rhythm inside the larger one. New moon, waxing moon, full moon, waning moon. Beginning, building, illuminating, releasing.
Not as rigid instructions. As meeting points.
A place to return. A way to ask better questions.
Seasons Are Not Static
One of the gifts of cyclical work is that it disrupts rigidity.
The same season does not mean the same thing every year. The practice deepens, changes, and reveals new things as the spiral keeps spiraling.
I once worked with a woman who loved winter. She called it “a three-month snow day.” Cozy, inward, quiet. A time to stay home and go deep.
But after the pandemic, she realized her winters had tipped into something else: isolation without any of the playfulness of a snow day. No sledding. No snow forts. Just withdrawal.
The next winter, she chose to live the season differently. More gatherings with friends. More connection. More outward movement.
And then she noticed she missed something. The inwardness. The hush.
That noticing was the work.
By paying attention, she could heed the inner call to add some inward time to all her newfound outward expression.
Cyclical time doesn’t demand that we do seasons “correctly.” It invites us to stay in relationship with them. To notice when a pattern needs rebalancing. To allow the same “archetypal territory” to be lived in new ways.
Cycles Within Cycles
The Wheel of the Year is not separate from daily life. It’s more like a fractal, a pattern repeated everywhere.
We live the cycle every day: dawn as spring, midday as summer, sunset as autumn, midnight as winter.
We live it across a lifetime: youth as spring, adulthood as summer, midlife as autumn, elderhood as winter.
We live it in the body: winter in menstruation, spring in the follicular phase, summer in ovulation, autumn in the luteal phase.
The same movements repeat, again and again, nested inside one another. Even in the in-breath and out-breath. Small circles and spirals and rhythms everywhere.
We know these patterns. This isn’t some woo-woo shit. Or maybe it is the best kind of woo-woo shit: deeply grounded in the body, in daily rhythms, and in the more-than-human world. Working these rhythms is practical and rooted.
Sweetness with Depth
Working with the wheel does not always have to be intense depth work. When my son was small, our seasonal practices were simple and sweet. On the winter solstice, we would put out cornmeal to “feed the sun” so it would return strong. The birds, of course, ate it. At the end of the day, I could say to my five-year-old: Look: the sun ate the cornmeal. We fed its return! No spectacle. No preaching. Just relationship to the rhythms and cycles of life.
Depth doesn’t disappear when practices are gentle. Sometimes it enters more easily.
The Wheel as a Container for Soul-Tending
Not everyone wants or needs weekly coaching. Many people aren’t in crisis. They simply want a rhythm. A way to return to themselves. A container that can hold reflection, grief, emergence, and waiting.
This is where the Wheel of the Year or the lunar cycle can become a powerful structure for spiritual companionship.
The wheel provides orientation. The moon offers cadence. Nature offers a mirror. The work unfolds over time, rather than being forced into outcomes and goals and achievements.
I do this work in my own women’s circle. We gather eight times a year, letting the seasonal themes orient our time together. The wheel becomes a kind of compass. Not because it tells us exactly where to go, but because it helps us ask: where are we now? What is this season asking? What is beginning, ripening, dying back, or waiting underground?
This is rhythmic soul-tending.
An Invitation
If this way of working speaks to you, I offer one-on-one spiritual companionship using the wheel of the year or the lunar cycle as a container for depth work.
You’re welcome to reach out for a free, no-pressure consult to see if this rhythm feels right.
I’m also exploring a small group offering rooted in seasonal rhythms… gathering across the year to reflect, orient, and tend the soul together. If you’d like to be on the list when that emerges, send me an email and I’ll keep you in the loop.
With Thanks
This way of working is indebted to the feminist spirituality scholars, teachers, and space-holders of the 1960s and 70s — to women like Zsuzsanna Budapest, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Starhawk, Vicki Noble, Donna Henes, my own mentor Susan Merrie, and so many before them, and before them
I am grateful to all those who kept cyclical, earth-honoring practices alive long before they were visible or marketable. This work did not come out of nowhere, and it certainly did not start with Instagram. 😉
I stand on their shoulders, and their wisdom moves through the work.