There was a spring I built an entire program by myself.
It was called LEEP, the Lotus Emerging Entrepreneur Program. This was before AI, before COVID, when people were still new to the idea of “online”. I wrote the material. I built the presentations. I made the artwork. I wrote the marketing and did the promoting and onboarded the clients. I delivered every session, recorded each video, then edited the recordings myself. Twelve women, three months, a closed container with a start date and an end date, which meant every single piece of it had to happen inside that window.
By the end I could barely finish the program. I know they felt it. That sent me into a guilt spiral of not enoughness. We closed with a beautiful day together, all of us cooking and eating and meeting in person for the first time, and I was so depleted I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
And I started drinking again. I had stopped, because I knew the way I was drinking wasn’t good for me. At the end of that program I picked it back up, because I needed somewhere to go that wasn’t my own body.
Then I couldn’t work at all. Not for a year and a half. I tried to relaunch LEEP several times and nothing came of it. I couldn’t market. I couldn’t post. I couldn’t do any of it. And in a year and a half online, everything changed. Suddenly everyone had a program. I lost my place entirely, and I held on so tightly to what I had built, terrified that all of it was about to be wasted, that holding on cost me more money than letting go ever would have.
That chapter nearly bankrupted me. It cost my nervous system, my body, my mental and emotional health, and my bank account. And every effort I made afterward was about recovering the sunk cost, without ever giving myself the time and space to replenish.
I didn't see the shape of any of that until I wrote it down, years later, in my memoir. I won't tell the whole story twice here. It's in the book.
What I was actually doing
I studied business management and spent years in corporate Canada working toward it. I left on purpose, because management, at least as I learned it, is the practice of measuring output regardless of what the output costs. I didn’t want to do that to people.
Then I went and did it to myself.
That’s the part that took me years to see. I had rejected the paradigm and kept the measuring. I had left the corporate world and brought its rhythm with me, and I applied it to myself and called it entrepreneurship. Constant output. Steady, linear, year round. No season for building and no season for anything else. Just produce, and prove, and produce again.
I kept going because I believed that if I did enough, I would finally feel worthy. That’s the deal I thought I was making. Work hard, earn my place, stop feeling like I have to justify taking up room.
Most of the women I work with are running the same deal. Almost none of them know it’s there until we say it out loud.
I have never met a woman for whom this worked.
The patch
For the fourth summer, I came to the patch with a simple plan. Fill a few buckets for the freezer, lend a hand to Little River Farm, get away from my screen for a while. I go because it brings me peace to be there.
The evening air was warm with a soft breeze, the world hushed except for birds in the bushes behind me. I cupped a cluster of blueberries in my palm, each one holding the sky in its skin. My thumb pressed gently for that subtle give, the sure sign they were ripe, and my hand came away covered in mush.
This year the berries ripened quicker than we had hands to pick them.
Almost nothing about that patch is under anyone’s control. Not the weather. Not the bugs. Not disease. Not how many people turn up to pick in a given year. The farm does what it can with what the land gives.
I stood there for a minute, genuinely annoyed. There was nothing peaceful about sorting all evening, the berries that could still go to market from the ones that were only good for jam. But I still had blueberries. Just not the ones I came for.
I’m not worth more because I picked them. I’m not worth less because they went to jam.
What the seasons actually are
I’ve been living this way for five years now, and the first thing I got wrong was thinking it was a system. A gentler calendar. Something to swap in for the one that broke me.
That isn’t what it is.
There is no schedule inside seasonal living. Nothing to follow, nothing to hit. You’re not swapping one measurement for a nicer one. You’re learning to notice what is actually moving in you right now, today, and to let that be legitimate information instead of something to override.
For women in midlife this matters more than almost anything, because nothing is predictable enough to schedule. You block the morning for the work that matters and wake up having slept two hours. You plan the week around the energy you had last week and it doesn’t show. Then you make it mean something about you. You didn’t follow through, you’re slipping, you can’t be counted on.
But the plan was never the problem, and neither are you. You were working from information that expired. The story we were handed says life is a straight line, and if yours isn’t behaving like one, you’re the problem. But we were never linear. We hold all four seasons at once and always have.
Maiden, mother, wild woman, crone are not stages you graduate from, they are movements alive in you in the same week, the same day. There is spring in a Tuesday morning and winter in the same Tuesday night. That isn’t inconsistency. That’s how a woman moves.
Nobody likes every part of this. I have not met a woman who is grateful for the sweats or the sleepless nights or what gravity has done. The point isn’t to enjoy it. The point is to stop treating your own rhythm as a malfunction and start treating it as the only real information you have.
The part that doesn't resolve
Here is what I can tell you now.
Seasonal living has not settled the worthiness question. Not fully, not for me, and not for any woman I’ve worked with. I know women with real wealth who still don’t believe they’ve earned it, because it didn’t arrive by the prescribed route of working hard and doing it alone. It follows women through every season and every stage. Maiden, mother, wild woman, crone. The question keeps showing up.
What changes is what you do while it's showing up.
When I lived by output, that question ran me. It set my hours, my prices, my inability to stop. Now it visits, and I recognize it, and I keep picking. Some years the fruit is perfect. Some years I go home with a bucket of mush and make jam. Neither one has anything to do with whether I’m worthy of the evening, the air, the birds behind me in the bushes.
You can’t work your way there. I tried. It nearly cost me everything.
We still have most of August. The light is still long. Go and see what this season actually grew in you, and let that be enough to go on.
I’m putting something together for the fall. Seasonal living isn’t something you take on all at once, so this is one season, in small pieces, walked through together. More on that soon.