The Rhythm Beneath a Woman’s Life

A new series exploring the quiet, recurring seasons within us. I’m calling it A Field Guide to Your Inner Seasons.

This is the first post. Enjoy.

I’ve been thinking about the seasons within us.

There have been seasons of my life I rarely spoke about while I was living them — seasons when everything felt dimmer, quieter, as though someone had quietly turned down the lights of my own spirit.

I didn’t call it anything then.
I just knew I was tired in a way rest didn’t fix.
I wanted softer things.
I moved slowly, spoke less, and kept feeling drawn inward, as if my life was asking me to hush.

For a long time, I thought it was something I somehow needed to fix.

Now I see it differently.
Now I understand: I was entering a season.
One of those deep, wintry interiors where the soul gathers itself.

And then — not always as quickly as I’d like — the smallest something shifts.
Nothing dramatic. No, never dramatic.
A hint of warming.
A moment of ease.
The faintest glow returning, like morning light slipping above the horizon.

I think of these moments as glimmers now.
But back then, they simply arrived as little flickers — the kind that make your chest lift in the slightest inhale of hope.

Maybe you, too, have known both of these places:

The hush.
The stir.
The strange, uncertain space between them.

There is always a middle, isn’t there?
A season where you don’t feel like who you were, but you’re not quite sure who you’re becoming.
Where you feel stretched between endings and beginnings — clumsy, tender, untethered.
Where clarity comes slowly, if at all.

I used to fight that middle.
Now I treat it like a threshold.
A liminal room where something within me gets rearranged, even if I can’t see it yet.

And then, in its own time, truth begins to surface.
Not loudly.
But quietly, steadily.
A sentence I finally speak aloud.
A decision that feels like exhaling.
A knowing that lands with the weight of honesty.

Only when I looked back did I see the pattern.
A rhythm I’d been living for years without ever naming:

The quieting.
The stirring.
The stretching.
The speaking.
The shining.

Over and over again.
Not in a line, not in a climb — but in a cycle, like seasons.

This is what I’ve come to call the Arc of the Soulful Journey, though it didn’t begin as a framework. It began as the simplest recognition of how my life kept unfolding. And when I began sharing it with other women, something beautiful happened: they recognized themselves in it, too.

Not in the abstract.
In the lived, ordinary ways we move through our days.

“Oh… I’ve been there.”
“I didn’t know it had a name.”
“I thought I was the only one.”

Naming it didn’t change the seasons themselves —
but it made them companions instead of mysteries.

And threaded through all of it — through the quiet winters, the tentative springs, the experimental middles, the brave emergings, the luminous stretches — was creativity.

Sometimes loud.
Often quiet.
Sometimes nothing more than the urge to gather paper scraps or jot down a sentence or stitch something with my hands.

Creativity was never the “outcome”.

It was the way my soul metabolized what I was living.

It honored my wisdom in the quiet seasons.
It nurtured my soul when things felt tender.
It shaped my story in the uncertain places.
And when the time was right — it helped me share my light.

These seasons still move through me.
Through most women I know.
Through you, perhaps, if you pause long enough to notice your own inner weather.

So I offer this rhythm, not as a doctrine or a demand,
but simply as a way of witnessing your own becoming.
A gentle naming of something you’ve likely been living for years.

And maybe — just maybe — the next time life grows quiet, or stirs, or stretches, or speaks, or shines…
you’ll recognize yourself in it.
And feel a little less alone.

Next in this series: Shadow (coming soon)

A tender look at the quiet season within so many of us.

An Invitation

If this stirred something in you, and you’d like a guided way to explore your own season of becoming, the First Light guide offers a beautiful beginning.

It’s a quiet five-day opening —
a way to sit with yourself,
notice what’s rising,
and enter your current season with tenderness.