Thoughts on seasonal living in the season of the empty nest

March 11, 2025

This is the continuation and conclusion of a previous essay titled:

Some foundations of Western cultural unseasonality: An introduction to seasonal living

It’s a long one, and I’ve recorded it as a video for you to watch or listen to if you prefer that format.

If you’re reading this in email you’ll have to click through to the blog to watch it. Or head straight to YouTube.

Before I get into it, I just want to say how lovely it was to meet the dozen or so people who attended the Seasonal Living salon on Sunday, February 2. Hearing other people’s perspectives on seasonal living was very enriching for me.

One of the big things I took away from that time was the importance of our attention.

Where and what we pay attention to cultivates awareness in our lives.

Here’s what I mean by that; if you desire to live more seasonally or feel more in tune with the seasons - this might be the calendar season, the season of your life, or the season in your body - pay attention. (The reason we’d want to be more in tune is to stop feeling the disconnect, numbing or misalignment - which can be physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc - that results from divorcing or severing ourselves from the natural world. And I consider the human body and our stages of life part of the natural world.)

As I laid out in my introduction, it can be challenging; it can feel counter-cultural (because it is) to attune yourself to seasons and to live more seasonally. There are obstacles in our way, and most of us live thoroughly modern lives dependent on many non-seasonal structures and systems.

But if we find ourselves drawn to seasonality, a good practice is to notice, attend to, and appreciate what’s happening in the natural world, including our bodies, right now.

This is not a striving for or straining against position; it’s an opening and softening.

Here’s an easy illustration from our salon. One participant shared that although she lives in a very big city without daily access to extensive natural landscapes, there is a tree in her yard that changes through the seasons. She has been paying more attention to that tree and appreciating its seasonality. Attending to that one tree brings more seasonality and sense of living seasonally into her life.

This idea of noticing and attending to what is already going on around us really resonated with me.

A level or layer of seasonal living involves growing all your food, for example. But that’s not accessible or even desirable for many of us. But what’s very accessible is noticing and appreciating our own environs.

Doing that leads you down a path of incremental and maybe not-so-incremental decisions that get you closer to the bigger ideals and goals you might have under the title of “seasonal living.”

This practice of noticing and attending can be applied to many layers of our lives. It’s not just about seasonality; it’s also a spiritual and creative practice.

Anyway, I gained so much from the salon and learned from other people’s experiences and wisdom. It was everything I was hoping for. Now, let’s move on to the rest of my essay.

My introductory essay on this topic established my reasoning for why Western culture dismisses limits, including seasonal ones. This follow-up explores two things: my attempts to respect the limits of seasonality in my own life and how the freedom of the empty nest season enables me to live more seasonally.

(I want to jump in here and say the problem with limits is not a Western culture thing. It’s a human thing. But I happen to live in Western culture and civilization, so this is the context I’m analyzing and endeavouring to understand.)

You might notice I’m approaching seasonality as an awareness and honouring of boundaries. This is interesting to me since when I started writing this back in December, I didn’t have “boundaries” or “limits” in mind as to how I would frame or discuss seasonality, but that’s how the writing evolved

Although I live in a society with structures and systems that theoretically enable, and therefore expect me to operate at the same level, like a machine, all year round, that is not how my actual body wants to live, nor am I even capable of it.

I’m a seasonal being, and that seasonality is expressed in many ways.

It’s expressed in my energy, outlook, interests, and capacity during different calendar seasons. It’s expressed in my monthly menstrual cycle (still going, though I’m definitely in perimenopause). It’s expressed in the arc of movement through my human life cycle: infant, child, adolescent, young adult, early adult, mid-adult, late adult, and elder.

I cannot state this more strongly: my physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual being is one of seasonality and variability.

The older I get, the more I want to own this and build a life that honours it. As much as I can, I want to listen to my body’s seasonality, listen to the calendar seasons, and live accordingly.

This brings me to the first point of this essay and what motivated me to write about this in the first place.

Post child-raising and empty nest it feels like I can lean into the rhythm of the natural world more than I could while raising kids.

I’m thinking here specifically of the teen years which demanded more pushing of my personal limits and desires because of my children’s social and material needs. For an easy example, I might want to be a house hermit for winter but my kids sure didn’t.

This was an interesting and not entirely welcome evolution after our early homeschooling years.

It was pregnancy, birth, taking care of my small children and then homeschooling them that really drew me to an interest in seasonal living.

Pregnancy and my desire for (and the actual experience of) natural births was my gateway drug (except no drugs 😂) into the whole “natural” living movement.

Setting aside, for now, the commercialization of this movement (which was bound to happen under market fundamentalism¹) and the ways in which that term is contested, natural living is often synonymous with, or another way of saying, seasonal living.

Later, homeschooling became an invitation, an access point, and a means to practice a more seasonally attuned life. What we did in our homeschool was very much linked to seasons, both in terms of the structure and the substance.

The kids grew, as they do. We moved around a bit and ended up in a big city.

And the things I wanted or needed in my life season as a midlife mom, raising and homeschooling our kids, were not the needs and wants of the teenage years’ life season.

On the flip side of this “needs misalignment,” the teenage years were also when our family actively pursued high-energy, high-fun (and more expensive) seasonal activities that greatly enriched my life, such as downhill skiing.

Damien and I were very intentional about doing outdoor activities as a family rather than pursuing individual sports. Although these things stretched us in terms of time and resources and sometimes conflicted with other personal seasonal desires of mine, the gains were more than worth the sacrifices. So, being stretched during the kids’ teen years was also very good for me.

I often processed and expressed these tensions in my writing during our Montreal years.

In short, the teenage years of our family life required supporting a level of activity and doings that did not exactly align with my own life season desires. (I don’t think this is a unique or uncommon experience for midlife women.)

In the early years of family life, I could build the environment, and the children’s activities were mainly contained therein. However, the teenage and young adult years moved our children beyond this container, as is supposed to happen. But because kids aren’t independent—they needed our material support (energy, time, resources) to help them push those boundaries—I was stretched past the limits that I had maintained in those early years.

At this point in the essay, a lot could be said about the cultural changes in parenting and child raising from the late 20th century and into the 21st century. We could talk about the rise of intensive parenting and the economic and social conditions that necessitate it. We could ask and investigate why 21st-century parents are so wrapped up in their kids’ activities, etc.… This is not that essay.

My basic point here is that the culture and our own decision-making and choices for our family (recognizing that these decisions are heavily influenced by macro-culture) necessitated a pace of life and level of activity that wasn’t always aligned with what I wanted or how I would choose, ideally, to live my life.

But that’s life, especially family life.

Now, to the second point of this essay:

So far, I have loved this season of the empty nest and the freedom it's given me.

Like community and society, family life is a collective, and you’re continually balancing the well-being of the whole with the well-being of the individuals who constitute it. But in family life it’s not a reciprocal relationship. Parents are responsible for their children, and children are not responsible for parents. Parents necessarily sacrifice, give, and go beyond for their kids. This is the particularistic ordering of the parent/child human relationship.

So, our desires and needs can conflict with our children’s. (But you didn’t need me to tell you that!)

For me, this is actually the gift of parenting. Having grown up Christian, I have a Christian lens for this. Many people are uncomfortable with Christian language for good reasons. So consider yourself warned.

Good parenting requires a particular kind of dying to self. If you don’t like those words, you can think of it as becoming less selfish.

But now that we have an empty nest, I don’t have the same responsibilities to my children that I once did. This loosening of my responsibilities and obligations outside myself has enabled me to live more aligned with my personal goals and priorities, which for me include more seasonally attuned living.

I’m a Type 6 Enneagram and resonate strongly with this personality framework. My personality is highly motivated by a sense of responsibility for others and for the care and well-being of those in my circle.

I also recognize the influence of gender expectations on women’s assumption of caregiving roles. Gender roles did not create my personality, but they definitely interact with it so that my personhood is expressed in ways specific to my cultural context.

Having inherited a high sense of responsibility from both culture (i.e., gender roles) and personality, the lightening of this load with the empty nest has been palpable and visceral for me.

I love not being responsible anymore for my kids.

To be clear, not being responsible for my kids does not mean we’re not helping them materially, emotionally, etc…. Of course, we are. And theoretically, I haven’t been “responsible” for them for a while. But I still felt highly attuned to their well-being when we had young adult kids living at home.

The empty nest has facilitated an emotional freedom I couldn’t experience while living with my kids.

Children are dependents, and in our culture, they are often dependent past the age of majority. What I am experiencing now is freedom from the weight of dependency.

I want to say something here. I do not ascribe to the idea of independent beings. Humans are interdependent and we need each other. I’ll quote something I wrote last summer:

Humans need each other, and we depend on our connections and relationships to make our way in the world. We remain dependent creatures all our lives, to varying degrees (subject to our constitutions and abilities) and in varying relationships (with partners, spouses, friends, and family). I.e., we are always dependent to some degree and in different capacities on others. There is no true “independence”, we are interdependent beings, yet we must grow into our adult roles and responsibilities. One of the goals of adulthood is to maximize your contributions to the whole by operating to the best of your abilities.

Even though they still need us and we want to be in close relationship with them (and help them), as I’ve moved into the empty nest stage of marriage and family life, I feel free in a way I haven’t experienced since before having children. And unlike our extended financially lean early years of marriage and family life, we now have more resources with which to enjoy this freedom.

I am in the empty-nest, midlife season. And because of the inherent freedom from parenting responsibilities, I can lean more fully into the calendar season and my body’s needs and desires during the calendar season.

I get to live according to my own rhythms. Am I even allowed to express how wonderful this is?

There has been a natural progression through life stages to this state of being, but also some deliberate decision-making, and no small amount of privilege and life fortune allowing such decision-making in the first place.

Living the seasons in this season of life.

For many years, I have endeavoured to be in tune with and appreciative of the natural world where I live. Fighting nature is a losing battle. Nature always wins, so you might as well join her side.

I’m thinking here specifically of appreciating the weather and seasonal changes where you live.

Some people move to new locations to do this, to be in a place where the natural environment suits their temperament more. We’ve never moved for that purpose though we have moved for the outdoor opportunities provided by the natural environment in particular locations.

In moving to different places (all in the eastern pocket of North America), I have learned things from the seasonality of each location, and aspects of my own seasonal appreciation have grown as I have experienced regional differences.

The little pocket of North America I’ve called home now for nearly a quarter century. I guess I’m an Easterner now.

Now that I have settled, for the long term, on this little plot of land at the edge of a forest on the Atlantic coast, nature infuses my life in ways I have long anticipated and desired.

I am astounded at my good fortune and this incredible opportunity to live in this naturally beautiful environment, in a home designed and built by my father to take in nature, reflect nature and incorporate nature in its actual construction (the concrete floors, these beautiful beams made from Nova Scotia trees, for example).

The natural world is what I look at all day out of the front windows; it is what I experience in the woods behind the house; it is the context I live in.

Living here, in this house, in this location, in this region, I can amplify the influence of the natural seasons in my life in ways previously not accessible to me.

This is such an incredible gift.

My work schedule during this life season also allows me to live more seasonally.

I work part-time, and although I work the same number of hours per month throughout the year, except for a once-a-year two —to three-week vacation, my work hours are flexible and set by me. (There is much to criticize about freelance, gig-economy work, and I’m very cognizant of its shortcomings for many workers. With a salaried-employed partner, I can carry the risk and enjoy the benefits of freelance work.)

My part-time work schedule enables me to do homemaking and home management during the other “working” hours, keeping evenings and weekends free. This adds margin for the seasonality of life, for its ups and downs, high and low energy.

Activities related to home and relations can extend into all waking hours, and there is never an end to the work that can be done around a home, garden/land, or property. However, where home and more importantly the people it nurtures and supports are what life is about this work provides a sense of fulfillment I don’t experience from the labour I sell in the market.

Part-time working has also allowed me to pursue a master’s degree, which I am finishing up right now. While in school, the time I can spend on home/property/land/garden pursuits is constrained. This was fine for the first 3.5 years of my degree while living in Montreal, where we had no land to speak of and equally minimal property responsibilities.

Now that we have a little bit of land and I have garden and property dreams to make into reality, I am so grateful this season of study is coming to an end so I can turn my efforts to these very seasonally rooted homemaking, homesteading, and land-managing tasks.

And finally, the seasonality of my body.

My internal systems function seasonally and cyclically—high and low, up and down. Change moves through me. To be sustainable during the fluctuations—i.e., to ensure I can produce at least maintenance-level progress/output in relationship tending, paid work, and homemaking—my schedule needs enough margin to accommodate my inherent and natural variability of energy and mood.

When I was raising our kids, I thought that maybe the work of raising them was the source of my highs, lows, ups, and downs.

In as much as their pain was my pain and their triumphs my triumphs, this was partly true.

But the variabilities are also just me. Changes in my hormones through my monthly cycle and life stages can amplify that variability.

After all these years, I know how I am, and therefore, I make sure there’s enough margin to accommodate the intervals when my production goes down.

Certain things have to function in my life: my closest relationships, income earning, my health and well-being, and our home. And there are other things that I highly value in my life. These are not survival-level like the list above but are emotionally, mentally, and spiritually important to me—tending relationships past the inner circle, writing and other creative pursuits that come and go in my life, having adventures and new experiences.

As I don’t intend to just “function” but thrive, I need plenty of rest interwoven with this. In fact, all this without rest is not possible. I need weekends and evenings. I need hours that are completely unscheduled and unaccounted for—empty space.

I require margin in my life for regular rest but also margin to cushion the times when I have less energy or find the functioning of the basics to be more draining or demanding because of circumstances or calendar season.

Another way of looking at this is as establishing a baseline.

Because I know my energy and capacity fluctuate seasonally or with life circumstances that can throw me into a “winter,” I have a baseline level of how much I can reasonably do if I have low energy or lower capacity.

When energy is high, I can do more. But when it’s low or when the season lowers the capacity (less daylight hours, less oomph), I do the baseline.

This baseline, or bare minimum as I called it then, is a trick I learned during my homeschool years.

Establishing a baseline level and using that as my minimum output and then adding things when I’m experiencing periods of higher energy is how I try to manage my time, but sometimes, this doesn’t work. For example, when things out of your control are added to your baseline but you’re operating at a baseline energy level, or when there is an internal clash about what should constitute baseline because your values are shifting.

My values have shifted since moving here, so I want to spend more time on things I didn’t use to prioritize as much, namely homemaking. The baseline is evolving, but I still have schoolwork to do.

I have to build, make, and live a life that works for me. And I keep learning about how I don’t want to live (or can’t live) when I bump up against my own limits. We can’t avoid this in life. We are tried and tested. Sometimes, we choose these tests, like going to grad school; other times, we have no choice.

I need to honour the cyclical and seasonal nature of my being. My life planning and time management need to account for my fundamental vulnerabilities. I must create patterns, rhythms and rituals, space, and medicines to honour, protect, and care for myself and others in our vulnerabilities. I need to use the strength I have during high-energy times to produce, shore up, and wisely steward all I have been given for the losses and lows that are inevitable, societally and individually.

As I age, this self-knowledge and drive become more pronounced. This most recent move and the context of our intergenerational, communal family living have made the messaging clearer.

I am a seasonal being in a seasonal, natural world. The more I can live attuned to this, the better.

Although I am in a period of high freedom, having emptied the nest, as my parents age and need more assistance, my caring responsibilities will return. I have work to do here, and that is what makes life meaningful. (This is an existential statement but also a very particularistic one. Our lives have meaning because we have work to do, as humans on the earth but also as particular humans in our given relationships and connections.)

I want to use this season of living next to my parents as friends and neighbours to make many deposits into the bank of our relationship, continuing our loving and respectful ways of being together and laying down many more good memories to sustain those years ahead. We also want to develop material systems and structures to the same ends.

Moving here puts me in a better position to live my values for a more seasonal, community-oriented, and locally-focused life. This move supports and enables a deeper level of familial relationship building, tending, and caregiving.

Values do not get lived out in the ether; they are brought into existence in the doing. And I want my life to be this doing.

The world external to our shared Sanctuary does not always align with these values, for seasonal living or otherwise. My path of seasonality and a commitment to particular values often goes against the grain, against the cultural current that I have no choice but to swim in.

This is definitely of some consequence because I live in that world. But that misalignment is not my burden to bear. My burdens are the responsibilities I have committed myself to.

So, this is where I land in my reflections on seasonal living. I am in a new season called the empty nest, which I am loving. In part because I feel an expansion of my time, energy, and freedom during this phase to live more seasonally.

As a woman (still) experiencing a monthly menstrual cycle, I have a seasonal body. More broadly, as a human, I am a seasonal being moving through life’s different stages. Seasonality is baked into my being.

The soft animal of my body asks me to pay attention to all this and honour my limits, creating guardrails for my life within which I can and will flourish.

Market fundamentalism is the overarching religion of Western culture. This is the belief that everything exists in service to the market (humans, the earth and the relations contained therein) and therefore anything and everything should be commodified including people’s attempts at natural, seasonal, or simple living.