A Season of Letting Go
How a practice of gratitude made room for grief
BGCL explores how we create meaningful lives through healing, unlearning, and connecting to nature. Keep reading for ideas on finding ourselves, reclaiming Earth wisdom, building community, and more. Let’s rewild 💚
Hello my Wild Ones,
We are rounding out the fall season—a time of letting go and releasing. A time of breaking down what is no longer needed and readying the foundation for new potential. During my years rewilding, I’ve observed nature organically releasing with such wisdom and grace. I wondered why it felt so challenging for me to do the same. The truth is, I feared what may happen if I let go, so I held tightly—to people, places, and things that I had outgrown. Until this year, that is, when I changed my relationship to gratitude and found a bit of seasonal wisdom that allowed me to let go.
Letting go begins with gratitude.
Every night I sit down to dinner, my son turns to me to ask, “Mommy, what are you grateful for?” It is a practice I started earlier this year out of a desire to make gratitude a regular part of our home life. For weeks, it felt forced and nobody was that into it. There were plenty of days I had to look beyond the life problems, annoyances, or simple inconveniences to find gratitude for anything. But with time and repetition, the mood around the ritual shifted.
One night, we slipped up and we didn’t ask the question at dinner. As I sat down to read bedtime stories with the boys, my oldest ran into the room and shouted, “Mommy, we didn’t do grateful for!” I was surprised for a moment that he remembered and that it mattered enough to point it out. I realized then that the practice was keeping us connected in a meaningful way—it gave us as a peak into each others everyday worlds.
My oldest son soon took the lead on asking the question each night and not long after, his little brother had enough words to participate with us. Over the months, we have shown gratitude for new connections, big accomplishments, hard lessons, good food, fun projects, health after illness, and so much more. Though my youngest son is only ever grateful for Grandma and Papa (both sets), and if pressed for something else, he is also grateful for Mommy and Daddy.
Our gratitude practice did something unexpected.
As we entered the fall season, I could feel myself becoming tense and anxious. The shift from blue skies to mushy grey days was sudden, and I gave myself a pep talk about facing seasonal depression head on this year. Our garden died back and we spent less time outside. I felt called to slow down, to turn inward, to digest the energy of the summer months, and to shed all that I had outgrown. But I was finding it hard to let go of the season that was.
All around me, the trees and plants were letting go, stripping down. Colors shifted from lush greens to hot reds, oranges, and yellows—tones reminiscent of fires that burn to clear a landscape. On the ground, slugs, snails, and fungus came to life to initiate another cycle of turning life to death. Unlike me, they released the past without fear and trusted that the season ahead was equally as important as the one we were leaving. Why couldn’t I do the same?
Each night I returned to our gratitude practice feeling the heavier emotions connected to this season—sadness, fear, anger, and grief. But right next to them, I also felt deeply grateful, which was new for me. As the season pressed on, the heavier feelings seemed less significant along side the gratitude. In real time, I saw myself gaining capacity to sit with difficult feelings as I prepared to let go. It was like the gratitude practice created a shortcut back to a state of peace, so I knew that I would never get stuck in a dense feeling.
Then the universe said: It’s time to let go, dear one.
Early in the season, our little world was shaken. My in-laws told us they bought a new house and were leaving their home in the city—the place that was our home away from home and our landing pad when we wanted to dip back into city life. It was also my husband’s childhood home, and it became my home too after living there with my son for a few years before moving to the country. It was a space where we all felt safe to just be and play.
I took it hard. Maybe because my childhood home had been sold just a few years prior without a chance to say goodbye. This home had become the next best thing. A place that held so many memories from so many generations and parts of the family. It was where I bonded with my in-laws and fell in love with Jewish and Nigerian cultures. It was where my son took so many baths, where he learned to walk and talk, and where I recovered after giving birth to my second son.
The weekend before the moving trucks came, we went down to stay one more time in our little nest in the attic. We managed to do all our favorite things: filled the table for Shabbat and watched bad TV until we fell asleep; we wandered the sidewalks looking at landscaping, pulling the boys behind us in their red Radio Flyer wagon; and stopped for a cup of Lebanese coffee at our dear friends’ house up the street, while six kids played at our feet.
I savored each moment, allowing myself to oscillate between being heartbroken about losing this piece of my life and grateful to have the memories. I wandered each room, pressing my hands on the walls and drawing up old memories—some my own and others I only knew from photos and stories. For days, waves of grief washed over me, tugging at my heart and many times causing tears to well up in my eyes before streaming down my face. But before I was pulled out into the abyss, a remembrance of gratitude would pull me back, hoisting me upward and onward.
We have to let go was create space.
After the final visit to the old house, my nightly gratitudes became focused on memories from that house—the summer nights eating dinner under the cherry tree, watching my kids play with their grandparents, and simply bumbling around the house for hours with people I adore. Meanwhile, my son had fully detached from the old and was bubbling with excitement for Grandma and Papa’s new house, just outside the city. I allowed his energy to feed ideas of possibility. I could picture it, but I didn’t believe it could be what we had before. I wasn’t ready to let go.
We arranged our first visit to the new house, and arrived late in the evening with the boys already in their pajamas. My in-laws greeted us at the door with open arms and kisses as usual, and I could smell something baking in the oven. The kids ran inside, screeching and laughing as they discovered all their old comforts arrange in a new space. We all stood in the basement watching the boys skip and sing, and I could feel the fear and doubt lifting from my heart. This already felt like home again and I was deeply grateful to see everyone so happy and at peace.
The final night of our stay, we gathered around the table for dinner as my mother-in-law served up a baked pasta dish she often made. We looked out at their view of Puget Sound, and each of us shared what we were grateful for—new memories, good health, loving family, and of course, Grandma and Papa. For the first time, my gratitude for the present moment felt far more substantial than the grief of losing the old house. It felt good to invite in this newness and embrace a season of releasing, just like the trees. I was learning to let go and see that space get filled with possibility.
My wish for you my friends is to continue to release with love and kindness. Allow the heaviness of the grief to rise and fall within you like a wave, knowing gratitude will hold you up. Trust that you are making space for something beautiful to emerge.
Until next time my friends, take care, be kind, and talk soon,
Rewilding Workshop: Balancing Being
Most of us were handed somebody else’s definition of a good life, and we never considered what we wanted for ourselves. It’s time to change that. All are welcome for this 2-hour online workshop to learn fresh perspectives and embodied rewilding practices to move towards a new vision. We will:
Discover ways of understanding the essential elements of your life and how to prioritize them differently.
Use embodiment practices, including breathwork and journaling, to tap into your inner wisdom.
Practice going inward for the insight needed to make different decisions resonate with your authentic self.
Connect with other people who are intentionally pursuing a life that is aligned with a greater purpose.
Come explore ways of being that align with your values and ground you in your nature. Grab a seat and let’s rewild:
As a thank you to my newsletter audience, use the code rewild for 50% off the ticket price! I appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you there.
Coming Soon: Rewilding Breathwork
Our modern world encourages us exist primarily in our minds, keeping us stuck in the stories we tell ourselves. We have forgotten (or never learned) how to drop into our bodies to fully experience life with all of our senses.
The rewilding journey requires deeper awareness of our bodies—to feel the emotions, engage with the senses, and learn the language it speaks. It requires us to know through experience, not through logic or reason.
If you have no idea how to begin this work of remembering to be in the body, our breath is a powerful guide. Breathwork has helped me to become more rooted in the present and has grown my capacity for navigating the complexity of our world.
I am excited to be combining the intimacy, honesty, and community of our in-person Rewilding Experiences with a practice that has changed how I engage with life. Stay tuned to learn more about how you can join me to breathe and rewild!
Lovely, Hillarie.
Great writing. I enjoyed it, including how you're reconciling your Jewish and Nigerian heritage.