WildWood Wanderings

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a naturalist and cyclical being.

It is almost my favorite season! Yet, I feel like I am running on fumes from the chaos that was August and so far the beginning of September. I have every intention to slow down, as I wrote about in my last piece, and part of that is taking more slow wandering walks in the woods. I don’t want autumn to pass me by without being tuned in to my awareness.

Last week I decided to start one of the worst books that I’ve ever read, just because the title was Autumn. Reading books usually helps my neurospicy brain focus (well…when it is an enticing read), but this book sets my brain on fire. It is written in a style that my inner dialogue knows well, because it jumps all over the place and never lands.

I realize that this is how I do these podcasts as well. I jump from one topic to the next, get distracted by a mushroom and forget what I was saying all together. It is really hard for me to stay on pace, so I apologize to anyone listening that finds this as frustrating as I have found this book. I will not be offended if you just can’t listen along, but I hope some of you feel like we’re having a friendly chat on an afternoon stroll in the forest.

If you are up for the adventure, here is what came through in this episode:

my cycle check-in from day 24

what seems to be my theme for 2026

stress causing physical manifestations

navigating through vines and fallen tree trunks

nature metaphors for life

wind in the leaves

cooking an inner autumn burnt dinner

desires to slow down into autumn

the balancing energy of the equinox

differences in spring to autumn equinox

two-fold energy of harvest

lessons from watching Clarkson’s Farm

fascinating fungi

sharing what we’ll do for our ritual on Saturday

what is coming up in The Elemental Grove for the autumn season

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

It felt so nourishing to be live again after a long hiatus from the practice. Thank you to those who joined me live to share the ritual together and bring your energy into this space.

Here are the timestamps for the replay:

* 0:00 - Some mic troubles, so fast forward…

* 3:00 - Welcome & Arrival practice

* 7:13 - Cycle Check-in

* 14:14 - Energy of Lughnasadh

* 33:36 - Pulling Cards & Journaling

* 1:25:51 - Closing

If you do this ritual, I invite you to share what cards came through and any reflections you had from connecting with the season of Lughnasadh.

Want to join in more community circles? You can join us in The Elemental Grove. Each season we journey with another element through reflection & ritual. I would be honored to welcome you on the journey.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

Welcome to the Elemental Grove. Each season we journey with one of the seven elements, and this summer, Fire is our guide. Over the next three months we'll be living with Fire—noticing it, learning from it, and weaving it into our practice. To support that journey, paid subscribers receive this essay as the foundation. They also receive the Fire Ritual Guide and are invited into our monthly Awen co-magic circles. For those seeking a deeper connection with the natural world, join us inside.

Walk outside on a sunny summer day and pause for a moment to bask in the sunlight. Feel your skin soak in the rays as your body warms.

You and I would not exist on this planet if the sun was not at the center of our solar system. The delicate balance of the fire element harnessed in the sun’s rays reaching us at the exact temperatures where life can exist.

Fire creating life.

Later in the evening, as the sun dips below the horizon, the air cools off and a fire is lit to bring back the warmth. This fire created by a spark igniting wood, has been a means of survival for thousands of years.

Fire sustaining life.

Today, it is easier to identify the destructive qualities of fire than it is to bask in the transformational energy that kept our ancestors alive. Fire by nature is temperamental, unpredictable.

The warming temperatures are making parts of the earth uninhabitable and many are having to relocate to find sustainable places to live. What was once prescribed burns to clear the forest understory, now are wildfires consuming everything in their path.

Fire destroying life.

This energy that we feel in the landscape is also within us. Where does fire show up in your own inner landscape? Does it feel like a warm embrace, guiding you towards your purpose? Or is it blazing hot, burning out all the meaning and leaving you in the ashes?

Our culture tells us to keep going. Produce more. Give more of our time, more of our energy, more, more, more…until we burn out. They say it is the only way to survive.

That is fire out of balance. It is not the only way.

There is another way to survive, and more than survive, to thrive!

By following fire’s natural rhythm, found in the cycles of body, moon, and earth, we can work with it instead of being consumed by it.

We need the fire to resist the pull of the dominant culture, and take back our inner power.

May it be so.

Before Existence there was Fire

The Big Bang was the birth of heat and light—the essence of the fire element before fire existed, before matter existed, before atoms existed. Then the stars, hot burning balls of fire, learned how to balance this energy to sustain themselves. When they couldn’t hold that balance, they collapsed in on themselves, then burst outward, sending particles out to reform into new life. Over four billion years, that process reformed those particles into you.

We are literally made of stardust. The fire in the sky is within you.

It took longer still for the fire we know here on Earth to appear. The first fossil record dates back 470 million years, when land plants were preserved as charcoal. Fire itself had to wait for oxygen; only once plant life had built the atmosphere up to at least 13% oxygen did wildfires become possible at all.

Early hominid species noticed the connection between lightning strikes and wildfires. It was probably hard to miss. And it didn’t take long for them to grasp the pattern and replicate it themselves. Burned wood and worked flint have been found dating back roughly 800,000 years, at least 500,000 years before modern humans existed.

The practicality of being able to create fire meant a means of survival. Now food can be cooked and more nutrients could be digested. They could also live in colder climates because their shelters could be warmed. And light the darkness to have more protection against predators. With fire supporting the means of survival, it was revered. Ceremonial uses of fire date back just as far as human existence.

Then we see the combination of elements together.

When fire and earth come together, we get ceramics. One of the oldest clay figures that have been found is of a human with drooping breasts and very wide hips, made around 28,000 years ago, the Venus of Dolní Věstonice.

Then comes the combination of fire and water, to create steam. This sets off the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760-1840) by using steam power to give energy to machines. Factories could now produce on a large scale and goods could travel across countries. This reality cemented capitalism as the dominant means of economy around the world.

This takes fire from a personal story to the civilization scale and begins to tip the scales from fire sustaining life to fire destroying life.

The same fire that powers progress, also powers extraction.

Industrial fire built cities, and in the same motion, began heating the planet that fire itself depends on to burn safely. The more we harnessed fire to build our world, the more we changed the very air and climate that decide how fire moves through the natural one.

That shift is still unfolding today. The same element that once meant survival in the cold now signals warning in the heat. Wildfires, once a natural cycle sparked by lightning and cleared by seasonal rains, now arrive more often, burn hotter, and spread faster, worsened by the drought and heat that industrial fire helped set in motion. The very force that let humans outlast the cold now threatens the ones who live through the dry season.

Fire has not changed. What has changed is our relationship to how much of it we’ve called into being, and how little balance we’ve kept as we’ve done it.

The stars faced this same threshold once. They burned as long as they could hold their own balance, and when that balance broke, what followed was not simply an ending. It was a scattering that became something new. Humanity now stands at its own version of that threshold, deciding what kind of fire we tend, and what we’re willing to let transform.

Reflect: Look back through your life. Find the moments when fire sustained you, and the moments when it overwhelmed you. Do you remember how each one felt, in your body, as they happened?

Fire in the Myth and Place

After reading through the history of fire, it should not come as any surprise how fire shows up across every culture through their myths and sacred places. Being a central means of how humans have survived, yet also not fully understood, creates a rich ground for magical thinking to form.

It also takes on the duality of fire—one that purifies and brings light and another that destroys and punishes. It is an energy that you fear in the dark and one that can push the dark away. I’m sure there are very distinct recollections in your mind on the stories of fire in the culture you were brought up in.

Let’s start with the fire that is warmth rather than threat—the deities who don’t punish with flame but live inside it.

In Hindu tradition, Agni is fire itself, a living deity who carries offerings from human hands to the gods, present in every household flame and every ritual pyre. In Hawaiian tradition, Pele shapes land as much as she destroys it, volcanic fire as creation and temper in the same act. In Yoruba tradition, Sango carries fire and thunder together, embodying justice as much as force.

But it's Brigid who deserves to anchor this. Goddess of fire, poetry, and smithcraft long before she became a saint, Brigid has a flame kept in her name in Kildare, Ireland, a flame that has been tended, extinguished, and relit across centuries. Her keepers held it through hundreds of years until it was ordered extinguished during the Protestant Reformation. It stayed out for centuries after that, until it was relit in 1993 by hands that understood exactly what they were bringing back. This is fire as an ongoing relationship, not a single event. Fire fed daily, not fire that strikes once and disappears into story. Not a myth about fire. An actual flame, kept by actual people, the same way people still tend the household hearth for Agni, an ocean and centuries away.

Then there is the other fire. The one that threatens.

Christianity built an entire architecture around it: hellfire as eternal, punishing, deserved. The imagery sharpened over centuries, a few scriptural lines about a lake of fire elaborated into the fully staged underworld. And that myth did not stay theoretical. Between roughly the 15th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, were burned across Europe and the New World on accusations of witchcraft, the logic of hellfire lifted directly off the page and applied to living bodies. This is not incidental to the myth. It is what the myth did when it was believed literally and enforced by people with matches.

Judaism and Islam have their own fire stories too. In the Torah, Moses comes across a bush that's burning but never burns up, and it's this strange fire that gets his attention, not something that scares him off. Later, the whole of Mount Sinai is described as covered in fire and smoke when God speaks to Moses there. In Islamic tradition, Ibrahim is thrown into a fire meant to kill him, and God tells the fire to go cool and safe instead. The fire doesn't disappear. It just stops being able to hurt him.

You can stand inside that same paradox today, in places where fire burns without any visible source. At Yanartaş in Turkey, flames rise directly from vents in the rock, fed by gas seeping from underground, burning continuously for as long as anyone has recorded. At Baba Gurgur in Iraq, a natural flame has burned for millennia. It is not hard to understand why ancient minds reached for gods and judgment to explain fire that needed no wood, no spark, no human hand, fire that simply was, and had always been.

And some fire is kept sacred by nothing more than devotion. In Yazd, Iran, a flame in a Zoroastrian fire temple has burned continuously for over 1,500 years, tended without interruption through empires and centuries. Not because the fire harms. Because it is too holy to be treated like an ordinary flame.

One final image breaks out of the duality entirely, not by choosing a side, but by completing a full cycle. The phoenix doesn't survive fire. It requires it. The bird ages, builds its own pyre, and burns completely. From the ash of the fire a new phoenix rises. There's no version of the myth where it avoids the flame. The ash isn't the tragedy, it's the necessary middle step. Renewal here isn't the opposite of destruction. It's what destruction turns into, if something is willing to walk into it and wait. The continuing cycle of life-death-rebirth.

Reflect: Which fire story did you inherit first, one of warmth or one of warning, and has it shifted since? Which one do you reach for first, and what would it mean to sit with the other?

Fire in the Outer Landscape

Until sitting down to research and write this piece, I would have said fire was the hardest element to notice in the outer landscape. I thought it only happened when humans lit it or lightning struck. Meanwhile, I look out the window and see the tree, ever present, representing earth. Air is constantly moving in and out, and all around. It’s not hard to find a body of water nearby, if you don’t live in a desert, and chances are it will rain soon.

But right now, this very moment, how can we connect with fire in the outer landscape without building a fire or waiting for a thunderstorm?

The sun is our natural connection point.

It generates its own heat and light and sends that energy down to us here on earth. It's the food source for nearly every plant alive, the beginning of almost every meal. It's also feeding us directly. Our bodies make vitamin D from it, something no other element can give us. Even on an overcast or rainy day, we know the sun is there. If it suddenly disappeared, it would mean the end of our existence.

Enquire: Look up the UV index where you are. UVI.today tracks the real-time uv index, as well as, the max that can be expected for the day. Right now, my uv index is 2, safe to go outside and enjoy, but the max will be 5 today which is a moderate concern for the heat.

For most of us, we’re active during the day, when the sun is out. Working against this rhythm, sleeping during the day and staying active at night, has been shown to have detrimental effects on the body. Another side-effect of capitalism pushing many people into that rhythm anyway, at a cost to their health.

With the long days of sunlight, summer is the season of fire. It’s the time of year you can feel yourself warming up the moment you step outside. At midday in July, you can feel the heat held in the air. That’s fire too, even though nobody lit a match.

By late summer, the grass along the road has usually gone from green to brown. The ground under it gets hard, sometimes cracked. That’s fire working slowly, pulling the moisture out of everything it touches.

Even the tree I mentioned earlier, the one standing in for earth, needs the sun to survive. It takes sunlight and turns it into matter. Leaf, branch, trunk: all of it condensed light, transformed into something solid enough to stand in a yard for a hundred years. Fire and earth are working together the whole time, we just don't usually think of it that way.

The sun also ripens what the earth grows. A green tomato left on the vine turns red because of it. And once that food is ready, fire finishes what the sun started. Cooking takes raw, separate things and turns them into one meal. It's transformation again, just in a different form. That same fire pulls people in around it. A bonfire brings a group of near-strangers close enough to talk. A hearth does the same for a family, everyone drawn to the one warm point in the house. Fire doesn't just transform what's put into it. It transforms the space around it too, and who ends up standing in that space together.

Watch the sky at sunrise or sunset and you’ll see fire’s actual colors: orange, red, gold. Nobody set the sky on fire. The sun is just low on the horizon, and its light has to travel through more air to reach us.

If you live somewhere that gets wildfires, you might know this element differently: smoke turning the sky orange, ash falling like snow. If you live near a hot spring or a geyser, you've felt fire coming up from the ground instead of down from the sky.

But fire’s absence shows up in the landscape too, and not always gently. Forests used to burn on a cycle, sometimes by lightning, sometimes set deliberately. Prescribed burns clear out the underbrush, recycle nutrients back into the soil, and keep any one plant or pest from taking over. A forest that burns on schedule is a forest kept in balance. Most of that has stopped.

The wildfires that do come now have decades of unburned undergrowth waiting for them. Instead of a low, manageable fire moving through every few years, there's one enormous fire with enough fuel to climb into the canopy and burn hotter than the forest was ever built to withstand. Withholding fire doesn't prevent it. It just builds up more kindling.

Enquire: Look up the fire risk in your area today, or check NASA’s FIRMS map to see where fires are actively burning around the world right now.

I live in Pennsylvania, on Turtle Island, and I’ve pulled a tick off my own skin more times than I can count. This state has one of the highest rates of tick-borne illness in the country, and it isn’t bad luck. Climate change means that the winters aren’t cold enough for long enough anymore to kill ticks off the way they used to. The burns that once kept the underbrush low, the same underbrush ticks wait in, mostly don’t happen. And as more of the land gets built into, the predators that used to keep deer and mice populations in check get pushed out too. Less fire on the land. More ticks in the grass. It’s one of the clearest examples I know of what happens when this element goes missing from a place that needs it.

And fire is rarely just present or absent. It's usually too much or too little. A wildfire with decades of fuel behind it is too much fire. A summer with no burns and ticks in every patch of grass is too little. The sun on your skin, a meal on the stove, a fire in the hearth: that's fire at the size it's supposed to be, which is exactly why it's so easy to miss.

Fire in the outer landscape isn’t rare. It just doesn’t always look like flame.

Notice: What's one place you walk past every day where fire has been quietly at work, and you never called it that?

Fire in the Inner Landscape

When we experience fire in the outer landscape, it is active and radiating. Those are the same qualities of how we experience fire in our inner world.

Your body is a conduit for the fire element. When you wake up in the morning, that is a spark that gets you out of bed. As your brain processes, it is firing neurons back and forth with activity making connections. As your body moves, fire is the fuel that lifts your foot up to take the next step and the circle your hips make to your favorite song. As you eat the strawberry, your digestive system heats up to transform food into energy.

Your nervous system, is carrying the electricity that flows through you. When the sympathetic (fight/flight) side of your nervous system is activated, the fire is being fueled. When you enter into the parasympathetic (rest/digest), the fire is being tamed.

Reflect: On a recent time when your sympathetic nervous system was activated. What caused the activation and how did it feel in your body? Then reflect on a time your parasympathetic was activated. What caused it and how did that feel in your body?

The physical aspects of what makes your body alive and working are not the only aspects of the fire element within you. There is also the ethereal aspects of fire that are found in your inner landscape.

Just by being alive and reading this sentence right now, you are tapping into the fire energy of vitality. You had the strength and energy to wake up today. Each day will have a different level of this vitality and possibly a different flavor.

If you have a menstrual cycle, the vitality you might feel during ovulation will most likely not be the vitality you feel on day 1. You probably feel that shift with the seasons as well. If you live somewhere with distinct differences in the seasons, you probably feel your vitality different during the light of the summer days vs. the dark of the winter.

But let’s get a little more ethereal, shall we.

If you met someone new and they asked you what lights you up, what would your response be? What makes you feel alive?

Now we are tapping into your passion, your drive, your purpose. You have been formed in a specific way from the culture you were born into, to the genetics of your ancestral lines, to all you have experienced since being alive up unto this point. That unique combination has created a spark within you to light the fire of your purpose.

This purpose is not always a career or a grand calling. Sometimes it is small and quiet. The way you feel when you’re in the garden. The way time disappears when you’re creating something with your hands. The way your energy shifts when you’re teaching or nurturing. Purpose is not one fixed destination you arrive at and then you’re done. It moves and changes as you do, the same way a flame flickers and adjusts to the air around it, never sitting perfectly still.

This fire within can also fuel our emotional landscape. When you picture fiery emotions, what do you see?

I’m sure some of those emotions were: anger, rage, frustration, irritation.

Experiencing these emotions can be unsettling, especially if the body you are in is not socio-culturally allowed to express these emotions, or you get labeled a certain way if you show them.

But rage itself is not the problem. Rage is information. It tells you a boundary has been crossed, that something you value has been threatened, that an injustice has occurred, either to you or to someone you care about. When rage rises in service of something real, it becomes sacred.

This is different from being consumed by anger or letting it control your actions. Sacred rage is not about lashing out. It is about recognizing the fire, listening to what it’s telling you, and choosing how to let it move.

Think of a mama bear. No one questions the ferocity she shows when her cub is threatened. That ferocity is not a flaw in her nature. It is fire doing exactly what fire is meant to do: protect what is sacred.

You have likely felt this rage at some point in your life, whether you let yourself fully feel it or not. Maybe it surfaced when your own boundaries were violated. Maybe it rose on behalf of someone you love, or in response to something larger, an injustice in the world around you. Wherever it showed up, it was fire doing its protective work.

Fire within you shows up in more ways than one. It is the spark that gets you out of bed and the electricity moving through your nervous system. It is the vitality that shifts day to day, season to season. It is the passion that pulls you toward what lights you up, and the rage that rises to protect what matters. All of it is fire, doing the many things fire knows how to do: activate, sustain, transform, protect.

You don’t need to have all of this fire figured out or perfectly balanced. Some days the flame will feel dim. Some days it will feel like too much. Both are part of the relationship you’re building with this element within you.

Reflect: Of everything fire does inside you, which one do you feel most connected to right now? Which one feels the most distant or hardest to access?

Balanced & Unbalanced Fire

Fire is the element most of us have exiled from daily life. We no longer tend hearths or bank coals through the night. And yet so many of us are burning anyway—running hot, running out, or running on empty.

Flames Too High

When fire is excessive, the body runs hot before the mind catches up. Reactivity replaces response. Urgency becomes the default setting. Anger simmers under the surface, or erupts, or both. Ambition tips into consuming everything around it, including the people close to you.

This is where burnout lives, not from a single overwhelming demand but from refusing to ever come off high alert. The body doesn’t know the difference between a real emergency and the habit of treating everything like one. Rest starts to feel like falling behind, so it gets skipped, and the exhaustion that follows isn’t from doing too much, it’s from never letting the intensity drop.

Reactivity moves in alongside it. A comment lands wrong and you’re not just annoyed, you’re already three moves into an argument that hasn’t happened yet. Words come out fast and can’t be taken back. The apology comes later, if it comes at all, and the pattern repeats before you’ve had time to actually feel what set it off.

Competition creeps into places it doesn’t belong. Conversations become something to win. Being right starts to matter more than being understood. There’s a pull to be the one driving, the one leading, the one whose idea gets used, even in rooms where none of that was ever the point.

And underneath all of it, compulsiveness. An identity built on output, where stillness feels like a kind of disappearing. Saying yes before checking if there’s anything left to give it.

Reflect: Where in your own life has urgency stopped being about what’s actually urgent, and started being the only speed you know how to move at?

Those with fire prominent in their charts: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius, may recognize this pull acutely. Fire signs carry courage, vitality, and the capacity to initiate, but the shadow side is impulsiveness, a need to dominate the room, and a tendency to burn through people and plans before either has had time to develop. If fire is strong in your chart, you likely already know the particular exhaustion of having said yes to everything and meant none of it fully.

You can also have a look at where your sun sign and mars placement lines up in your natal chart and reflect on the interactions of fire with those placements.

Enquire: If you don’t know where fire shows up in your own chart, look at your sun, mars, and any placements in Aries, Leo, or Sagittarius at Cafe Astrology. Where is fire asking to be expressed in you, and where might it be running the show instead?

In the menstrual cycle, this excess shows up at ovulation, the inner summer, when energy peaks and the body is at its most outward-facing and expressive. It’s a real and potent phase, but it’s also where many of us override the body’s actual signals in favor of the high. We say yes to the extra thing, push through the workout we should have skipped, keep talking past the point where we’ve already made our point.

As that peak of ovulation passes, energy naturally recedes. That's not a problem. What turns it into one is having burned through everything during the high, so instead of a natural taper, you're left with nothing. That can show up as irritability or a hard crash. For those tracking lunar cycles, the full moon carries this same charge.

Notice: At your next inner summer or full moon, try noticing the moment you hit the peak, and see what it feels like to stop there instead of pushing past it. What does it feel like to say “no.” at that point?

Flames Too Low

You may have moments where that fire feels dim, where you can’t locate your passion or feel disconnected from what lights you up. This does not mean the fire has gone out. It means it is banked, resting under the coals, waiting for air and fuel to rise again. Tending this inner fire is not a one-time act. It is an ongoing relationship, one that asks you to notice when the flame needs more fuel, when it needs protection from wind, when it simply needs time to rest before it can burn bright again.

Apathy is often the first sign. Not sadness exactly, more like a numbness where things that used to matter sit there untouched. There’s a difference between rest and this—rest still has warmth underneath it. This is colder. It’s not choosing stillness, it’s being unable to locate the spark that would move you out of it.

Motivation goes next. Tasks that were simple become things you circle for days without starting. Procrastination isn’t laziness here, it’s the absence of ignition, nothing catches. Passion feels like something that happened to other people, or to you a long time ago, a purpose you used to feel connected to that’s gone quiet without explanation. Direction goes with it. It’s not just low energy toward a goal you still hold, it’s not knowing anymore what the goal even is.

Then there is the inability to assert yourself. The words you’d normally say in your own defense don’t come, or come too late, after the moment that needed them has passed. Saying no starts to feel impossible, so you say yes instead, and let things slide that should have been challenged. You take up less space than you actually need, and over time this can tip into feeling invisible, like the parts of you that used to be seen have dimmed along with the fire that lit them. Fire is often what draws people toward you, so its absence can mean being genuinely overlooked, not chosen, not sought out, in ways that compound the loneliness already underneath it.

Something lighter goes missing too. Playfulness, the impulse to flirt, to take a small risk just because it’s fun, to not take everything so seriously. Deficient fire can look like a heaviness settling over what used to feel easy.

The body reflects it back. Cold hands and feet, even in warm rooms. Low appetite, or eating without tasting much. Vitality drops, sexual energy along with it, a general sense of the pilot light running low. Days move at the same flat pace, nothing standing out as more alive than anything else, joy just out of reach.

This can follow a period of burning out, the flatness after the flame had nothing left to feed on. It can also show up in the depth of winter, when the pull toward hibernation is strong and the idea of igniting anything feels far away, or during longer stretches of grief or depletion where the body is conserving what little it has. Neither is a failure. Fire that has gone low is still fire. It just needs tending before it can rise again.

Reflect: Can you recall a time when your own drive or spark felt completely absent? What was happening around you then? Have you noticed a pattern in when your fire runs low?

Finding Balance

Balanced fire does not mean constant intensity or a passion that never rests. It means heat in right relationship—with your body, with your capacity, with the people around you. It is drive that fuels rather than consumes. Anger that informs without controlling. Passion that lights the next thing without needing to burn through everything to get there.

Notice: Working with fire this season is an invitation to notice your own patterns. Do you tend toward burning too hot or going cold? Does it shift with the moon, with your cycle, with the demands on your time? Are there people or situations that pull you into urgency, or that leave you feeling like the spark has gone out?

When fire is burning out of control—the reactivity, the urgency that won’t let up, the compulsion to do more, win more, prove more—the medicine is often water. Submerge yourself, in a bath, a lake, the ocean, anything that asks your body to cool and soften. Let yourself cry if it’s there. Slow your breath deliberately. Water doesn’t fight fire, it just reminds it that not everything needs to burn right now.

When fire has gone quiet—the flatness, the numbness, the inability to locate what used to light you up—the medicine is often air. Move your body outdoors. Change the air in the room, literally and otherwise. Seek conversation that excites you, the kind that gives you something to talk about. Breathe deliberately and fully, in a way that feeds rather than just sustains. Air is what fire needs to catch again.

The practices in this season’s ritual guide are designed to help you cultivate your own relationship with fire. To call it in when it has gone cold, to cool it when it is burning through you, and to learn, over time, what balanced fire actually feels like in your particular body, your particular life.

Because that is the work. Not achieving some fixed state of balance, but developing the awareness to know where you are and having the tools to move from there.

Working With Fire

Fire asks for one thing—your attention, not your perfect timing. And you’ve already given it more than you think.

You are working with fire every time you let a passion take hold instead of talking yourself out of it. Every time you choose the harder, truer action over the comfortable delay. Every time you feel your own aliveness and don’t shrink from it. Even the decision to rest, when rest is what will actually replenish you, is fire rightly used.

A few invitations for the season:

Light something. A candle, most days, and let it be more than a habit. Watch it. You are looking at a small piece of the same process that powers the sun, that built every star, that has passed hand to hand since the first fire was kept alive. Let that sink in.

Watch the sun move. Step outside and just receive it, no analyzing. Where does the sun sit today? What grows because it’s there? What does the heat do to your body, your mood, your sense of what’s possible?

Track your inner fire. Notice where you tend to sit: flaring too hot and heading toward burnout, or banked so low you’ve gone stagnant. Does this shift with your cycle, the moon, the stretch of the season? A simple log will show you the shape of it over time.

Take Action. Fire is the element of will. What’s been sitting unlit, waiting for you to act? Name one thing, and do it.

Create. Create something with your hands. Cook, paint, build, move your body until it's working. Let the act of making be how you find fire again.

Dance. Put on music that moves you and let your body lead without choreography or self-consciousness. Let movement be how the fire finds its way back.

May it be so.

Ritual Guide

The ritual guide is no longer on the Thrivecart Learn platform, but lives here on Substack. This guide is full of invitations to help you connect with fire throughout this season. You can bring these practices to our Awen Co-magic Circles and we’ll practice together.

Awen Co-magic Circles

For every element we will have two Awen co-magic circles. They will be held on the third Sunday of every month at 12pm ET. If you have never been to a co-magic circle before, here is what to expect. We will join together on Zoom and begin with a short calling in of the elements. You will be invited to share your intention of what kind of practice you will do and then we will spend one hour, each doing our own practice individually. This is a body doubling accountability and motivational space. After the hour of practice, we will join back together to share what we did and close the circle.

Working with fire:

July 19th at 12pm ET (check your timezone)

August 16th at 12pm ET (check your timezone)

The Elemental Grove Chat

I have made the chat private only for those in The Elemental Grove. As we go through the elements you are invited to share in the chat what is coming through for you, whether that is a reflection on the main post or something from the ritual guide, an image of something in your daily life, a piece of creative work you are currently processing, all is welcome there.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a druid and cyclical being.

The last podcast I recorded was at the beginning of the year and it is difficult to believe that we are headed quickly towards the summer solstice. There have been so many pieces shifting and moving for me this season, much like the air element in this season of spring.

Luckily, I had a 90 minute gap between the gym and my next appointment, so I thought it would be a great time to find some grounding in one of my favorite natural areas. And why not take you along with me! Oh how I wish you could come hiking with me.

Until that day comes when we are together in-person walking through the forest, enjoy exploring it through my wanderings.

Here is what came through in this episode:

* my cycle check-in from day 25, which turned out to be the last day of my cycle

* a podcast episode on stinging nettles that I can’t seem to find now to give you the link

* lots of distractions with wildflower photos

* difference in brushing past and grabbing a stinging nettle

* finding ways to stay grounded and present through the hard things

* buds bursting on an American Beech

* story of hiking in the Himalayas and falling into a stinging nettle patch

* feeling into the transition between spring and summer

* signs of that transition in the land

* reflecting back on the places I’ve lived as we get ready to move again

* the exhaustion of continually uprooting and re-grounding

* reflections of journeying with the air element in The Elemental Grove

* the trillium patch that has dried up

* how there are finite air molecules circulating in the atmosphere

* the cycling and sharing of breath

* an age of too much air and finding the ground

* spicebush and spicebush swallowtail butterflies

* magical ferns covering the forest floor

* strange temperature fluctuations here in May

* struggling to let go of the capitalist agenda that values expertise

* creaking of a falling tree

* my love for learning and sharing what I’m learning

* feeling the solidity of the earth with each step

* right now all we need to do is be here

Photos from this wildwood wandering…

Thank you for being with me and taking a moment to wander. I would love to hear: What transitions are you navigating at the moment? How are you staying grounded in the midst of change?

may the earth hold you,

Once a month, paid subscribers in The Elemental Grove gather live for an Awen Co-Magic Circle—where we slow down, tune in, and work with the current season together. This month we’re continuing our exploration of air: where it shows up, what it’s asking, how it moves through us.

When you subscribe to The Elemental Grove, you’ll receive seasonal ritual guides with meditations, tarot spreads, nature prompts and more to support your journey through each season.

Our next Awen Co-Magic Circle is Sunday, May 17th at 12pm ET. We’d love to have you there!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

Welcome to the Elemental Grove. Each season we journey with one of the seven elements, and this spring, Air is our guide. Over the next three months we'll be living with Air—noticing it, learning from it, and weaving it into our practice. To support that journey, paid subscribers receive this essay as the foundation. They also receive the Air Ritual Guide and are invited into our monthly Awen co-magic circles. For those seeking a deeper connection with the natural world, join us inside.

Take a deep breath. Feel the cool air arrive on your nostrils, feel it expand your lungs, your belly soften, then feel the warm air leave your body and go back out into the world.

That breath you just took contained roughly 25 sextillion air molecules and those air molecules have been recycling throughout time. One could have been breathed by Mary Oliver. One by The Buddha. One by your great-great-great-grandmother. One by the largest oak tree in the world.

The air you just breathed has also been breathed by your neighbor, your ancestors, ancient forests, and the dinosaurs.

Our atmosphere is almost entirely a closed system. You take in oxygen with each breath; your body absorbs it, transforms it into carbon dioxide, and releases it when you exhale. That carbon dioxide is taken in by plants and, through photosynthesis, converted back into oxygen.

The cycle continues as it always has.

Now, take another breath. In. Out.

Did it feel different?

In your body, air knows exactly what to do. In the world we live in, it's a different story. Most days I feel like I’m suffocated by the energy of air. Not unlike stepping off the plane in Mumbai to hit that wall of hot sticky air.

The racing thoughts at 2am that won't let me sleep. The decision I’ve turned over so many times it's lost its shape. The feeling of having consumed so much information that I’ve turned numb. The anxiety that hums underneath everything, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.

This is air out of balance. And it is not a personal failing—it is the world we have been given.

But by coming together and practicing our magic, we have the power to bring air back into balance. Within ourselves, our relationships, our communities, our world.

May it be so.

Breath has always been where the story begins.

In the Hindu tradition, prana—the life force itself—is inseparable from breath, understood not merely as air moving through lungs but as the animating energy that flows through all living things and the cosmos itself. In Norse mythology, Odin walked a shoreline and found two lifeless trees. He breathed önd (breath and spirit) into them, and Ask and Embla became the first humans. In Genesis, God shapes a figure from clay and breathes life into their nostrils. And in the Haudenosaunee tradition, Skywoman falls from the sky world, descending through open air, caught by the wings of geese who break her fall. Creation itself arriving on an inhale.

Across traditions, breath is not just biology. It is the first gift. The threshold every breathing creature has ever crossed to enter the living world. The same air. The same arrival. Our ancestors did not need a word for that. They simply knew it.

The Latin anima (air, breath, soul, vital principle) carries the same knowing. From that root grows animal (a being with breath), animate (to give breath to), and animism itself. Animism is the oldest spiritual understanding on earth: that the living world is exactly that—living. Not backdrop. Not resource. Not metaphor. That the tree, the river, the stone, the wind each carries their own spirit, their own aliveness. That we are not separate from the web of life but woven into it, breath by breath. It is the worldview that underlies most indigenous spiritual traditions, and it is the worldview that modern industrial culture has most aggressively worked to dismantle.

And for most of human history, information traveled from person to person: carried in the mouths of storytellers, sung by bards, passed hand to hand, breath to breath. Then, around 1440, Gutenberg’s printing press changed everything.

The printing press was itself a product of air—born of inspiration, driven by the hunger to communicate, to connect, to spread ideas beyond the reach of a single voice. For the first time, ideas could travel faster than the people who held them. Religious reformation, scientific revolution, political upheaval. All of it became possible because ideas could now travel faster than any institution could contain them. Shakespeare’s plays reached audiences across continents who would never see them performed, his words becoming part of a shared human conversation that continues to this day.

But air does not discriminate between what it carries. The same press that spread new ideas spread fear. The Malleus Maleficarum (the handbook that fueled the European witch trials) was one of the most widely printed books of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The same technology that liberated thought was used to codify and spread the persecution of those who existed outside the sanctioned order.

Five hundred years later, the internet did it again. The distance between ideas collapsed entirely. A thought written in one corner of the world could reach every other corner within seconds. Every voice, suddenly, had the potential to carry.

When the Arab Spring began in late 2010, social media carried messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, helping people organize protests, share information with the world, and build networks of solidarity that crossed borders overnight. Movements that once took years to build could now find each other in days. The voiceless, suddenly, had a platform.

But the internet carried the same double edge. The same platforms that connected activists connected algorithms designed not to inform but to addict. Engineered to keep our attention locked in a perpetual scroll, our outrage and our anxiety carefully cultivated because they are more profitable than peace. The attention economy did not arrive by accident. It was built, deliberately, on the understanding that human attention is a resource to be extracted. We did not just get more air. We got a tornado, and someone else is deciding which direction it blows.

And here we arrive today with the world air built. It is the world we are learning to navigate—with discernment, with intention, with the ancient knowing that breath was never meant to be owned.

Reflect: What idea has traveled to you—a book, a conversation, a chance encounter—that changed the direction of your life?

Awen & the Bardic Tradition

In druidry, air is the element of the bard (the keeper of story, song, and memory). Before writing, before the printing press, before the internet, there were bards. They were the living library of their communities, carrying history, genealogy, law, and myth in the only vessel reliable enough: the human voice, moving on breath.

At the heart of the bardic tradition is Awen (the flowing spirit of inspiration). Often represented by three rays of light, as seen in the center of the image above. Awen is the divine creative force that moves through us all in our moments of inspiration and creative pursuits. Its origin story is one of the most enduring in Welsh mythology.

Cerridwen was a powerful enchantress who lived on an island in the middle of Bala Lake in north Wales. She had two children: a daughter of extraordinary beauty and a son, Morfran, who was considered hideously ugly. Knowing that her son’s appearance would close doors to him in the world, Cerridwen resolved to give him the one gift that could compensate—the gift of Awen itself. Wisdom, inspiration, poetic brilliance. She set her great cauldron over a fire and filled it with herbs, grains, and the ingredients of her spell. The potion would need to brew for a year and a day without stopping. She set a blind old man to tend the fire and a young servant boy named Gwion Bach to stir the cauldron, and she went about her work.

Near the end of the year, as Gwion stirred, three drops of the boiling liquid leapt from the cauldron and landed on his thumb. Without thinking, he put his thumb to his mouth and in that instant, everything Cerridwen had been brewing for a year flooded into him. All the wisdom, all the inspiration, all the Awen. The rest of the potion became poison and the cauldron cracked.

Gwion knew immediately what he had done, and he knew Cerridwen would come for him. He ran.

What followed was a chase of shape-shifting transformations. Gwion became a hare; Cerridwen became a greyhound. He became a fish; she became an otter. He became a bird; she became a hawk. Finally, desperate, he transformed himself into a single grain of wheat and hid among a pile of grain on a threshing floor. Cerridwen became a black hen and ate every grain until she found him.

Nine months later, she gave birth to a child so beautiful she could not bring herself to harm him. She wrapped him in a leather bag and set him adrift on the water. He was found by a Welsh prince named Elffin, who upon seeing the child’s radiant brow named him Taliesin—meaning “shining brow” in Welsh. The child who had been a servant boy, a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain, had been reborn as the greatest bard in Welsh tradition. A poet of such power that his words have survived more than a thousand years.

This is what the story tells us about Awen: it does not arrive through effort or worthiness. It arrives through accident, through transformation, through the willingness to be changed by what you encounter and sometimes, through being consumed entirely and reborn.

I’ll be honest with you: Awen is the concept in druidry I find most elusive. It is, by its nature, air—invisible, ungraspable, known only by what it moves through. I have sat with it, chanted for it, waited for it. Sometimes it arrives clearly. More often I am simply trying to stay open.

In my candidate degree, the bardic exploration asks you to learn something new. To tap into Awen and approach a skill as a beginner, with curiosity rather than mastery. I chose crochet. I had never done it before. I sat with yarn and a hook and a lot of confusion, and slowly something emerged. A stitch, then a row, then a pattern. Something that did not exist before existed now, made from nothing but fiber and repetition and attention.

That, I think, is Awen made tangible. Not the grand lightning bolt of inspiration, but the quiet accumulation of showing up. The breath behind the making.

Reflect: Is there a skill, a practice, or a form of expression you have been circling but haven't begun? What is keeping you from picking up your “hook”?

Air in the Outer Landscape

Step outside on a still day and you might forget air is even there. It asks nothing of you. It makes no demands. And then a wind moves through the trees and suddenly the whole forest is speaking.

This is one of air’s great lessons: it is only visible through other things. Smoke rising. Leaves turning. A flag lifting. Clouds pushed across a sky. Air reveals itself through what it moves, and in doing so reminds us that the invisible is always present, always active, whether we notice it or not.

Spring is air’s season—the time of year when the world exhales after the long inward breath of winter. Watch it happen. The first red-winged blackbirds arrive before the snow is gone. Spring peepers begin before the ground has fully thawed. The dawn chorus builds week by week, each species adding its voice to the growing conversation. This is air at work—communication, call and response, the living world in constant signal with itself.

Sound itself is air made audible. Every birdsong, every rustle, every crack of a branch is a pressure wave moving through the atmosphere, arriving at your ear as information. The landscape is never silent. It is broadcasting constantly. The question is only whether we are listening.

Wind carries seed. It carries spore. It carries the scent of rain before the rain arrives. It is the great distributor, the element that refuses to let anything stay only in one place. Pollen from a single oak tree can travel miles. A dandelion releases its seeds to pure faith in the current (or the breath of a small child).

Notice: I invite you to go outside or open a window right now and practice receiving air. Not analyzing it—receiving it. What is it moving? What is it carrying? What is it telling you?

Air does not stay in one place. It moves across property lines, across neighborhood boundaries, across city limits. The same wind that carries birdsong and pollen also carries particulate matter, ozone, and industrial emissions. And it does not distribute these things equally.

Low-income and underserved communities bear a disproportionate burden of air pollution—situated more often near highways, industrial facilities, and waste sites. This is not accident. It is the result of policy, of power, of who gets to decide what gets built where. Air justice is environmental justice.

As you deepen your relationship with air, I want to invite you to turn that attention outward to the Air in your actual landscape.

Enquire: Look up your local air quality. The EPA’s AirNow tracks real-time air quality across the US and lets you search by zip code. (As I write this mine is currently 35 AQI). IQAir does the same globally. Find out what your Air Quality Index actually is, and what it has been historically.

Then go deeper. Search “air pollution [your locality]” and “environmental justice [your locality]” to see what is happening in your specific environment and organizations that are focused on air quality around you.

You don’t need to do everything. You need to know what is true where you live, and find one thread you can pull.

Tending Air is not only an inner practice. Because it is shared by all we need to take care of one another.

Air in the Inner Landscape

If air in the outer world is wind and birdsong and the scent of rain coming, air in the inner world is thought. The mind is air’s domain—restless, associative, always moving, always making connections. Watch your thoughts for five minutes and you will understand exactly what uncontained air feels like.

But air’s gifts run deeper than thinking. It is also the energy of communication—the bridge between what lives inside you and what you offer to the world. Every time you find the right word for something you have been trying to say. Every time you finally speak a truth you have been holding. Every time a conversation opens something in you that was closed before. That is air moving.

Inspiration lives here too. The sudden clarity. The idea that arrives whole. The solution that appears not when you were forcing it but when you stepped outside, or washed the dishes, or let your mind go still. Air does not arrive on demand. It arrives in the spaces between effort.

And then there is discernment—perhaps air’s deepest gift. The ability to distinguish signal from noise. Your own knowing from borrowed opinion. What is true from what is merely loud. In a world of unrelenting information, discernment is not a luxury. It is survival.

Notice: Close your eyes and let your mind wander where it wants to go. Where does your mind tend to go? What does it return to? What thoughts move through you like weather—arriving, passing, gone—and which ones settle in and stay?

Balanced & Unbalanced Air

Air is the element most of us in the modern world have the most complicated relationship with. We live in it. We are saturated by it. And yet so few of us feel like we are breathing well.

Too Much Air

When air is excessive—in our lives and in our bodies—the mind becomes untethered. Thoughts multiply faster than they can be processed. There is a quality of spinning, of being unable to land. Anxiety lives here, and so does overthinking, indecision, and the particular exhaustion that comes not from doing too much but from thinking too much. The body gets forgotten entirely. Sleep becomes difficult. The nervous system runs on overdrive.

In the natural world, we are seeing this reflected back to us right now. The windstorms tearing through this spring—trees down, power out, the air itself feeling volatile and destabilized—are air in excess. Climate disruption is, among other things, an air imbalance made planetary.

Those with air prominent in their natal charts—Gemini, Libra, Aquarius—may feel this acutely. Air signs are gifted with intellect, communication, and adaptability, but the shadow of those gifts is restlessness, detachment, and the tendency to live so far in the mind that the body becomes an afterthought. As a Gemini rising myself, I know this intimately. My mind is always moving, always looking for connections, always onto the next thing before the current thing is finished.

Enquire: If you don’t already know your sun, moon, or rising signs, look them up at Cafe Astrology. Put in your place and time of birth and you will see how the cosmos were positioned the moment you took your first breath.

The inner spring (pre-ovulation) time of the menstrual cycle carries this same air energy. After the inward stillness of bleeding, energy returns. Inspiration floods back. There is a genuine and beautiful aliveness to this phase. And it is exactly where I, and many others, lose the thread. The energy returns and we run with it—immediately, fully, without pacing. We plan too much, commit too much, think too much, and by ovulation we are already depleted. The waxing moon carries this same quality for those tracking lunar rather than menstrual cycles: the energy builds and builds, and without awareness it tips from vitality into overwhelm.

Notice: The next time you arrive in your inner spring (or the waxing moon phase) take note of where your mind pulls you. Is it driving you forward asking you to forget your body? Or do you struggle finding traction? You can follow the pattern of your mind for a full cycle and see what unfolds and when.

Too Little Air

The other side is less talked about, but equally real. Too little air feels like creative drought. The words won’t come. The mind feels foggy, slow, unable to make the connections it normally makes with ease. There is a sense of being locked inside yourself—knowing what you feel, but unable to articulate it, unable to think your way forward or find the inspiration to try. Communication breaks down. Ideas stall. The inner world goes quiet in an uncomfortable way, not the nourishing quiet of water or earth, but a kind of stuckness.

This can arrive after a period of too much air—the crash after the frenzy. It can also arrive in the deep of winter, when it feels like the spring may never come. Or in the inner autumn (pre-menstrual) window when the mind turns inward and critical. For those tracking the moon, the waning and dark moons can carry this quality. When the inner critic is loud or we are more permeable to criticism and judgements from around us, it shuts down the flow of inspiration and creativity. We lose the confidence needed to take a risk and put our ideas out there.

Reflect: Can you remember a time when you felt stuck, when the inspiration and creativity felt stalled and you couldn’t get going. What was happening in your life in that moment? Have you noticed any patterns of too little air and when you feel stuck?

Finding Balance

Balanced air does not mean the absence of thought or the silencing of the mind. It means the mind in right relationship—with the body, with the earth, with the present moment. It is the quality of attention that is both expansive and focused. The conversation that is both honest and kind. The creative flow that is generative without being depleting.

Notice: Working with air this season is an invitation to notice your own patterns. Do you tend toward excess or toward depletion? Does it shift with the moon, with your cycle, with the seasons? Are there relationships or environments that push you into imbalance?

When air is spinning out of control—the racing mind, the overwhelm, the anxiety that won’t settle—the medicine is often earth. Get your hands in soil. Walk barefoot. Eat something slow and nourishing. Let your body remember it has weight, that it belongs to a place, that it is not only a mind. Earth holds what air scatters.

When air has gone quiet—the creative block, the stuck feeling, the words that won’t come—the medicine is often fire. Move your body. Change your environment. Seek out conversation that excites you. Light a candle and let yourself want something. Fire ignites what air has let go cold.

The practices in this season’s ritual guide are designed to help you cultivate your own relationship with air—to call it in when it has gone quiet, to ground it when it is spinning, and to learn, over time, what balanced air actually feels like in your particular body, your particular life.

Because that is the work. Not achieving some fixed state of balance, but developing the awareness to know where you are and have the tools to move from there.

Working With Air

Working with air does not require elaborate ritual or perfect conditions. It requires attention. And you have already begun.

Every time you step outside and notice the wind’s direction. Every time you pause before speaking to find the true word. Every time you sit with a decision long enough to let clarity arrive rather than forcing it. Every time you breathe—consciously, fully, all the way down—you are working with air.

This season, a few simple invitations:

Breathe. Return to the breath you took at the beginning of this post. Do it daily. Not as a productivity practice, not as optimization—as a remembering. You are made of the same air as your neighbors and your ancestors and the oldest oak tree in the world. Let that land.

Listen. Go outside and practice receiving rather than analyzing. What is air carrying today? What is the wind saying? What is the chorus of birdsong singing about? What is the dawn light telling you about the state of your landscape?

Notice your patterns. Where do you tend to fall on the air spectrum: toward excess or depletion? Does it shift with your cycle, with the moon, with the season? Keep a simple record. Patterns reveal themselves over time.

Speak. Air is the element of communication. What have you been holding that wants to be said? To whom? In what form: a conversation, a letter, a poem, a song?

Create. Pick something you have never done before. Approach it as a beginner. Let Awen find you in the making.

May it be so.

Ritual Guides

The ritual guide is on the Thrivecart Learn platform. All you need to do is put your name and email on the form by selecting the button below. Then you will receive an email to create a log in for the platform. If you have taken a course or been in community with me, you probably already have a login on Learn. If you can’t remember either “forget password” or reach out directly to me on here or email: [email protected].

Awen Co-magic Circles

For every element we will have two Awen co-magic circles. They will be held on the third Sunday of every month at 12pm ET. If you have never been to a co-magic circle before, here is what to expect. We will join together on Zoom and begin with a short calling in of the elements. You will be invited to share your intention of what kind of practice you will do and then we will spend one hour each doing our own practice individually. This is a body doubling accountability and motivational space. After the hour of practice, we will join back together to share what we did and close the circle.

Working with air:

April 19th at 12pm ET (check your timezone)

May 17th at 12pm ET (check your timezone)

The Elemental Grove Chat

I have made the chat private only for those in The Elemental Grove. As we go through the elements you are invited to share in the chat what is coming through for you, whether that is a reflection on the main post or something from the ritual guide, an image of something in your daily life, a piece of creative work you are currently processing, all is welcome there.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a naturalist and cyclical being.

We are 15 days into this “made-up” year of 2026. Nothing astronomically marked our passage into a new year. A piece of paper (a calendar) simply ushered us from December 31, 2025 into January 1, 2026. And still, there’s a part of me that wants to get everything in order, to clear the decks, and begin anew. I love dreaming, visioning, and setting intentions. ✨

Yet, I’ve been wondering lately if goal setting (or even New Year’s resolutions) are still a thing in 2026? No judgment for those who have their goals mapped out and are already kicking those resolutions into shape, but I have found that living cyclically doesn’t leave much room for the linear idea of setting a goal and marching step by step toward it until completion. This linear framework just don’t work for the slow, gentle life my mind, body, and spirit want to live.

When I look back on my life, I can’t recall a single time I moved straight ahead, head-down, towards a big goal. There have always been ups and downs, lefts and rights, moments of backtracking, even times of being completely turned upside down. These are what I’m calling side quests. They change the path and, in doing so, shape and inform where I’m actually meant to go.

After feeling disappointed with my wish jar from last year, and with all the side quests I took throughout 2025, I’m choosing to reframe my intentions to be more expansive and spacious enough to hold more side quests.

Listen in as I explore these concepts (and more) throughout the episode:

* the fluctuations in temperature throughout the winter season

* my cycle check-in from day 10

* introducing my pup, Cinnamon

* emotional check-in around what’s happening with 🧊

* feelings of spiritual renewal since the solstice

* finding warlock’s butter fungus

* how noticing things in nature during the winter feels special

* learning from Cinnamon about not taking a direct path

* pondering about goal setting

* letting intentions grow roots before taking action

* allowing side quests to inform where I’m going

* reflecting on my wish jar from last year

* how there is no end point in nature or even our universe

* perennial and annual plants that both have a cycle

* finding oyster mushrooms, hearing a northern cardinal, and coming across a dead raccoon

* sharing one of my intentions for the next two years, that I will be offering on here beginning in April! 💨🔥💦🌲✨

Thank you for wandering with me, for listening, and for moving through this exploration of intention without a fixed path. This space welcomes side quests, slowing down, and paths that only reveal themselves along the way.

I would love to hear: What intentions are you carrying into this season and how willing are you to let side quests reshape them?

may all your side quests bring wisdom,

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

We are gathering around the Samhain Hearth on November 1st. Sign up to join us here: https://meghannorean.thrivecart.com/samhain-hearth/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a naturalist and cyclical being.

I have been finding it really difficult to write these days, so I thought recording a podcast would be easier. Well, it was! And then I realized that I needed to write a description to go along with it, that was the hard part, but here it is now.

I recorded this on August 1st, the day you might call Lughnasadh or Lammas. I did find and eat my first wild blackberries this season! But I feel really disconnected from the energy of abundance and harvest. There is enough food in this world for all of us to be fulfilled, yet so many go without, whether by force, by design, by systems rooted in greed and control. How do we celebrate abundance while others starve?

I feel more fear and hopelessness, than I do abundance at the moment. After recent ICE raids in my community (literally 2 blocks from our house), I’m on edge and not even slow walks through the woods seem to be easing my nervous system.

Here are some of the things I process in this episode:

* musing on why making this podcast is easier than writing a post

* my cycle check-in from day 16, inner late summer

* feelings of discouragement with my body

* a hillside of baby trees (which I totally misidentified!), I now believe they were northern spicebush

* annoyance with the mosquito buzzing in my ears

* how I feel spiritually disconnected

* all the dried up crusty mushrooms

* the ICE raid in our community with large support by the local police

* the fear and nerves I feel for my spouse when he goes out everyday

* learning from the mushrooms how to decompose

* my experience at a recent forest bath

* forced disconnection from the Land

* the starvation in Gaza

* reflecting on trees that blew down

* how life feels the opposite of simple

* what it means to have a high reward food system

* talking about the book I’m absolutely in love with right now!

* musing about how much I’ve learned being a naturalist over the last two years

* a sad fern story

* first blackberry harvest, fitting for this Lughnasadh season

* holding on to hope

Photos from recent wildwood wanderings…

Thank you for witnessing me today and being open to slow walks in the woods. I would love to hear what you are noticing around you these days? What are the stories nature is telling you?

holding it all, together, with you

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a cyclical being.

I recorded this on April 24th, when I was close by my favorite local park and spring was just beginning to look like spring. As you’ll hear in this episode, I have been underwater and overwhelmed, so it has taken me almost a month to get from recording to uploading. 🫠 Not surprisingly, I’m in the same point of my cycle today as I was when I recorded this: inner late summer/early autumn. Sometimes it feels like I only have two or three days in my cycle when I can actually complete a task. ufff…

But no more dwelling on how I feel disappointed in myself for taking so long to upload this episode and more celebration that I finally got it out there! Thanks for coming with me on my walk and having patience along the way.

Here are some of the unfurlings in this episode:

* nature observations on this warm spring day in Pennsylvania

* the slow growth of the trillium

* playfulness of the jewelweed

* how I am actually unsure of my cycle day at the moment

* struggling without a routine

* stress of home renovations

* all the busyness that has kept me away

* my new injury that has put a dent in regular life

* how disrupting it is without sleep

* the lack of butterfly observations this year

* making impulsive choices with adhd

* short-term pleasures with long-term ramifications

* cycles of overwhelm, numbing, and recovery…repeat

* pondering on how these cycles overlap with my inner seasons

Photos from this wildwood wandering…

Thank you for wandering with me, and for being open to noticing the land beneath you—even in the midst of overwhelm, delays, and everyday life.

What’s stirring in the nature around you these days? What’s it reflecting back to you?

together in the unfurling of life,

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com

If you are new here to my podcast Wildwood Wandering, welcome! This is an irregularly posted podcast where I take a walk in the woods and share nature observations and reflections from my life as a cyclical being.

I visited a new park for this wandering and had a short timeline before making it to my rain water catchment workshop, yet I managed to connect to the land and myself. Here are some of the tidbits I share in this episode:

* my cycle check-in for day 14

* nature observations on this late winter/early spring day in Western PA

* joining the Western PA mushroom club

* what is phenology

* finding black bear scat

* traipsing in the mud

* gamifying my spiritual practices

* healing from a bad ankle sprain and the disappointment of not being able to complete some goals I had set this year

* what are vernal pools

* my work in the world and how my purpose matters in the political climate we are in here on Turtle Island

* being authentic and how the revolution needs all of us to show up in who we are

Photos from this wildwood wandering…

Thanks for listening along with me and opening yourself up to more awareness of the land beneath your feet and the connection within you.

What are you noticing in the nature around you? What is it teaching you?

may you move through the mud with grace,

Wildwood Wanderings is a listener-supported podcast. To support this work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meghannorean.substack.com