The Myth of Perpetual Summer

Cyclical living, befriending death and unravelling the myth

For a while I have been on a mysterious journey of deepening into the wisdom of cyclical living and what that means for my life, work and activism. It’s amazing to be part of a movement of people reconnecting to the nature based map of the Celtic Wheel of the Year and the many rituals that would have been practiced hundreds and thousands of years ago in connection to it.

These practices feel like a powerful opportunity to reconnect with the land and earth ways that carry the traditional ecological knowledge of these particular islands* I belong to and to see how these practices and rituals were ways of honouring the power of the natural world, from the cycles of the sun to the power of the seed.

As many people rediscover what it means to honour the thresholds and portals of the Wheel of the Year, I wonder how we can do so in a way that continues to centre 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱. My sense is without including this within our awareness, can we ever truly use these maps in they way they were truly created? In the way that some of our ancestors might?

What I am learning is this spiralling work of cyclical living is a story of re centring nature’s intelligence, especially when us humans often get so caught up in a human centric approach to many things. And especially when the journey of our separation has led and continues to lead us towards our demise through a climate and ecological emergency of epic proportions.

What sparks my curiosity as a cyclical practitioner is how we might learn to rewire ourselves to what is natural, living and deeply alive in our bodies but often lying dormant in a culture that ignores the intelligence of our natural world via creating a society that is always ‘on’.

Actually, the deep work and activism of cyclical living and therefore the Wheel of The Year is that it helps us become more eco-centric, more attuned to the rhythms of the natural world, less cut off from the pace of our bodies. And this reconnection helps us see the absurdity of how we live severed from the rhythms of our human animal nature and the wider ecosystems we live within.

That constant need to be ‘on’ is akin to a perpetual summer, where there is only beauty, blooming and light, where the decent and death that makes life possible is cut and cast out like a dark twin.

But it is only through that dark twin that regeneration is possible.

This perpetual summer myth seen in economic systems of constant growth has led us on a path towards annihilating most life on this planet through global warming, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. It seems to be a perpetual summer of capitalism and colonialism that believes it will never burn out even as the planets lungs are on fire.

As long as we live in this dangerous myth then we will be heading towards the cliffs edge, or like Icarus we will fly too close to the sun and feel the grave consequences.

This burning bright light is sustained by our continued separation of seeing nature as something else, something different or outside of ourselves. But it is within us. It exists in our brain chemistry and biological blueprint. The journey of our whole lives from birth to death is natures cyclical intelligence put into practice.

And therefore our whole lives offer an opportunity to dismantle the ideals of perpetual summer, this slow, steady and sometimes painful work of obliterating the myth within us that believes we need to be ‘on’, working, producing, creating, being youthful, beautiful, growing, developing, innovating, producing more, forcing, hiding our age, ignoring, pushing, producing…

It is so insidious and like many others I often tie my worth to what I can do, especially when I care deeply about the world, but I see how cyclical living slowly begins to help loosen the jaws of this treacherous story and with each breath I return to my body and remember that I belong to something much bigger than myself.

There is a great potential in the resurgence of cyclical wisdom in all it’s forms but I often wonder if we are just using it as another tool of the machine rather than seeing it as a map that can leads us back to nature.

When I let the wheel of the year point me towards the more than human world and help me apprentice to the descent and the darkness, (the side of the Wheel that most folks might feel a little bit unnerved by) I feel the true power and wisdom of what it means to live cyclically.

Of course you would be unnerved by this mysterious dark twin when our entire western culture rarely talks about death and dying, rarely creates space of pause and stillness. Where grief, rage and the power of emotion are pathologies of mental illness when really they are healthy expressions of a human responding to trauma… and these times are traumatic when we think about the scale of loss, harm and destruction that happens every moment every day. Of course we are a bit uncomfortable with what’s hiding in the dark.

But I often feel as thought it is the key to obliterating this perpetual summer myth... To somewhat surrender and befriend chaos, confusion, darkness, loss, grief — our wildness untamed, our teeth bared gnarling growl of survival. That everything to be discovered in these dark mercurial places are available as doula to a dying system. They are what we need to learn as we midwife an emerging future.

Cyclical living can never truly be communicated through memes read from behind a screen, it can only be felt in truly living and finding that intimate relationship with life & death. So get out there, stay close to the ground, let your knees get muddy, descend into the earth and allow yourself to unravel this myth that is so tightly wound around you core. Befriend mystery and the more than humans as your allies in remembering that you are home and you belong. And from that place, from that truth, what world might we create?

Describing my home as the United Kingdom, British Isles or England has never sat right with me and feeds a story of colonisation. I’ve decided to refer to the country I live in as islands that helps me connect to the indigenous ancestral people that once lived here.

For more explorations cyclical living check out www.regeneratingrhythms.org