A Season for Stillness

on health, healing, and living with the seasons

January days are dark. The sun has risen by about 8AM but it’s hidden behind a wall of thick, grey cloud that hangs close and heavy with rain, blocking the light and blotting the landscape beyond the nearest tree line, shrinking our world down to our immediate surroundings: the grey stone walls of this old homestead standing against a dark backdrop of glistening holly; ivy climbing the gateposts; early bulbs springing alongside trodden paths through the grass; robins pecking in the mud; rain pattering on fallen leaves; bare limbs of ash and sycamore dripping; ravens overhead riding the low, liminal airspace where cloud breaks into drizzle, so low you can feel their wingbeats pulse against the wind. Sound is at once muffled, echoing and close, deceptive. The air is close, heavy, tiring. The light is dull, grey, depressive.

Years ago, as young woman in my twenties and early thirties, caught up in the hustle of scraping by with a child in school, working physically active, outdoor jobs and moonlighting as a life model, means to be met and a heavy weekend social life to keep up, I would frequent the local beauty spa for the use of their sun shower to get me through the dull, grey fog of January. I would come out of those three-minute blasts of artificial UVA and UVB light and back into the gloom of the January street feeling and looking like I’d spent a week in the sun, energised and glowing. I also used to use a daylight lamp on a timer as my alarm clock, to get me up bright and sparkling before the sun rose on those dark, dreary days of deep winter when dragging myself out of bed in the dark became a grind. Little tricks to cheat the seasons, to cheat the cyclic seasonality of my circadian body and keep plugging on, day and night, year round. It worked, for a while. While I was young and fit and invincible. Little did I know that I was only setting myself up for the burn-out and chronic fatigue that would floor me in my thirties.

At the beginning, a deep tiredness came over me. I would go to bed early, try to sleep it off. Holding the poses at the art classes I modelled for became such a struggle I’d feel faint—I’d have to step down mid-pose to take a break, sit with my head between my knees until the blood came back to my brain and the wooziness passed. It didn’t seem to matter how much I slept or rested, I just kept getting progressively tireder and tireder over years, until, at my worst, I could barely stand up in the shower. The effort it took to lift the lead weight of my own arms above my head to wash my hair made my heart pound, my head spin and my legs buckle. I felt like I couldn’t get enough oxygen, like I was breathing through silt, like my blood was thick and sluggish, it hurt as it tingled through my arteries and the effort it took to pump it through my body was all the effort I could muster. I could barely stand up without my head spinning, and stumbling. Climbing a set of stairs was like running a marathon, I’d have to pace myself, one step at a time. There were days when lying on the sofa was exhausting so I would sink to the floor, try to drop every part of myself below my heart so it wouldn’t have to pump so hard. The slightest exertion, just the weight of my own body would floor me. My bones ached. My skin burned. The lightest touch, even the touch of clothing hurt. Noise and lights and smells were painful sensory overload. My by then part-time gardening work became an immense drain that I would spend the rest of the week and weekend recovering from, despite allowances being made for me to sit, rest when I needed to, take the lighter work. I couldn’t go to my grandmother’s funeral, the grandmother who wrote to me just weeks before she died to tell me my grandfather’s roses were blooming, because I couldn’t even contemplate making the journey by plane, navigating airports and bus stops, carrying luggage. I couldn’t go out, socialise, make plans, just a grocery shopping trip would take days to recover from. I had to conserve my energy, allowing time to rest in between even the lightest of household chores, like loading the washing machine. I remember my mother, always the speaker of truth, telling me I was “starting to have the air of a sick person”. I felt like a sick person. I had a diagnosis: endometriosis. Along with the crippling fatigue were a whole bunch of other painful, debilitating symptoms that would cycle through the month, near constant nausea, food sensitivities, infertility, and crazy mood swings that would have had me institutionalised not so many decades ago.

Bear with me, there is a point to me sharing all this. I had pushed the limits of my body, burnt the candle at both ends until there was nothing left to burn. My sleep and wake cycles, stress hormones and sex hormones, all intricately interconnected in a finely woven web of feedback loops, were all frazzled and knotted together like a tangled up mess of hotwire (if you’ve ever had to untangle a roll of electric sheep netting you’ll picture exactly what I mean).

It is a terrifying and humbling thing to lose one’s abilities. I had been a gym junkie, I trained horses and worked tough, physical jobs. I was fit and strong and proud of my physicality. Losing that was losing part of my identity, part of my self. I had been fiercely independent and I became dependent. I had to learn to accept help, how to ask for help. I had to learn the limits of my body, the limits of my capabilities. I had to learn how to say “I can’t”. For a time, I thought that this was my life now, I couldn’t see a way back to being strong and healthy and I could no longer keep pushing the limits of my body in the name of productivity. I had long broken those limits. I now had to figure out how to restructure my life to fit around a chronic illness. I trained to be a women’s health coach so that I’d be able to work from home, to my own schedule, and to learn the tools and nutrition to manage my own health.

And I started to get better when I went against the grain of all the oestrogen-cleansing, hormone-balancing, eat-more-broccoli nutrition science I was taught, stopped eating all plant foods and went on a fully carnivore diet. The dissonance between what I was being taught and what I felt in my body left me completely disillusioned by the entire nutrition and wellness industry (it’s all a racket—just eat real food, the kind that grows from the soil beneath your feet, the kind your great-grandparents ate before food and healthcare became commodities, and listen to your body). That’s a whole other story, but just for context here, I already ate a “healthy” diet, I rarely ate grains or processed foods or sugar, I avoided dairy, wheat and a whole bunch of other foods I was sensitive to. I popped all the vitamin pills and supplements and piled up my plate with a rainbow of vegetables—and my guts hurt, all the time. Within a week of eating no plants and only meat, the fog had cleared from my brain, I could think clearly and my energy began to lift. Within two weeks the pain had left me, completely, and I felt fit enough to climb a small hill (which I did). I saddled my horse and rode for the first time in years. I felt alive again, like a fog had lifted, like waking up from the fuzz of half-sleep. Like my body was remembering how it felt before the aches and strains and weariness of adulthood. The effect of a meat-only diet was phenomenal, but it was only the beginning, a jumpstart on my way to recovery, not the long term fix.

That came when I stopped trying to force my body to keep up with the continuous demand for productivity of the modern world and started adjusting my life and work to fit around the cycles of my female animal body. There’s a lot floating around out there on how our female physiology doesn't align with the nine-to five, five-day-week structure of the working world. Our creativity, productivity and energy levels ebb and flow with our hormonal cycles and not the standard working schedule. Women are many times more likely than men to be diagnosed with stress-related illnesses, depression, seasonal affective disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, hormonal disorders, and so on. But it is also true that men are more likely to take their own lives, or to rely on alcohol or drugs to keep pushing on through. None of us, man or woman, are meant to work like machines, keep plugging on endlessly cheating the seasons or the cycles of our bodies, or keep up a continuous stream of output. We are cyclical, seasonal, circadian beings, made of water and salt, designed to ebb and flow. I got better when I ditched the alarm clock, the daylight lamp, and learned to structure my life around the rhythms of my body and the land. I quit my job, we took the drop from two incomes to one so that I could slow down, rest when I needed to, not when the clock or the calendar allowed, work to the cycles of my body and the seasons, and grow the food I needed to be well. The animals I raise and share my life with are not just pets or livestock—they are my life, my health, the sustenance that gives me the strength me to feel alive and human. They are a big part, but still only part of the story.

I share here some of what’s worked for me, what keeps me well and able, living in the context of a highly seasonal, temperate island in the Northern Hemisphere with mild, light summers and deep, dark winters, where summer gives lush green riches and winter falls back to the bare bones. There were other factors, too. Herbal and gut-healing protocols. Eighteen months on a strict carnivore diet, consuming only the deeply nourishing, animal source foods my body needed to rebuild and reset, before slowly reintroducing plant foods, and continuing to base my diet on high quality animal protein with a little veg as a side. Maybe some of you can take something from it, wherever you are in the world.

Eat plenty of pasture-raised animal fats (the pasture-raised bit is important—fats from animals raised under the sun, grown from the soil under our feet, come with the correct array of fatty acids and vitamins aligned to the climate). Eat the stored summer sun in winter as starchy roots, tubers and winter squashes, and in summer eat the fruits and other riches offered for the season. Avoid seed oils, sugar, exotic fruit, and anything grown under a foreign sun, grown for uniformity and transportation over flavour and nutrient density, or forced under artificial light. Turn the lights down when it’s dark outside and get plenty of sleep. Strictly limit screen time, and use a blue light filter. Get as much exposure to natural sunlight as possible, outdoors, unfiltered by glass, clothing or sunscreen, throughout the year. Watch the sun rise and set, rise and set with the sun, in summer and in winter. Never wear sunglasses, let the full spectrum of sunlight penetrate the darkest recesses of your brain. Howl at the full moon, walk barefoot in the mud and dance in the rain. I’m not joking—our bodies’ rhythms are intimately tied to lunar cycles, there are many documented benefits to grounding through our bare feet on the earth¹, and, well, when it rains most of the time and you work outdoors, what is there to do but dance?

Living seasonally isn’t just eating local foods and wearing wool in winter, and it isn’t some new-age fad—it is the way of living in accordance with the Earth we are part of that our bodies are designed for. It is re-attuning our circadian, cyclical, animal bodies to the light and seasons of the land we live on. It is living within the context of our landscape and climate, the way our bodies recognise, the way humans always lived until very recently in the great scheme of evolution. Living seasonally isn’t just connecting to our land and locality, it is connecting to the core of our human-animal being.

Yes, January days are dark, so sleep, or stare into the embers of a willow wood fire and dream of summer. There is a season for action and growth and production, and there is a season for stillness. Roll with it. Be thankful for every sunrise, even when it’s hidden behind a thick, grey wall of cloud.

---

1. The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4378297/