Music. This is Belonging, a podcast that explores being alive in the age of loneliness. I'm your host, Becca Piestrelli, a writer, mother, and community tender currently living on the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marin County, California. In this show, we explore topics like rites of passage, cultivating meaningful community, seasonal and cyclical living, and what it means to be a good ancestor in these times.
I have thought-provoking conversations with friends, teachers, elders, and ancestral medicine keepers to help support you in bringing more meaning and connection to your life. I also pop in here and there to share updates and learnings from my own story, because we were meant to do this together, cosmically holding hands as we walk the spiral of life. You can expect to be challenged by new or old ideas. Face your beliefs and what systems informed them.
Get curious and brave to tell the truth about the deeper, harder things and feel comforted in the knowing that you don't have to navigate it all alone. Music. Hello dear ones and welcome back to Belonging, the podcast. It's Becca Piestrelli here with you on a beautiful June morning. I'm recording this on the 1st of June, and really noticing.
The seasonal shift from spring to summer here where I live in the Northern Hemisphere, in the bio region where I live in Northern California, and wanted to make an episode for you about summer. And you can listen to it when it's summer arrives where you are. So for the folks listening in the Southern Hemisphere, if you're listening to this around the time I drop it. It's winter, winter is coming. But I realized I have made episodes about
ancestral practices and rituals for connecting with all the seasons, except summer. So we will link in the show notes to slow emergence from winter into ancestral rituals for spring, which is the spring one. Winter rituals and practices, which is the winter one. And then autumn is the the season of the ancestors, which is the autumn one.
And I wanted to share about summer. But before I dive into this episode, I wanted to share an offering of mine that I feel pretty jazzed about that I'm offering this summer and maybe beyond, but I'll share more about what's happening for me and timing of a bunch of things in my life in a moment. But what I've really felt after many years, this is my 10th year of doing this work. Or a variation of this work, is a real desire to get back into the craft.
There was something about writing a book and that sort of took me away from serving in a more deeply intimate way with my clients and my groups. And I had to, I had to go into writing and promoting and I had this podcast. And I sort of picked up steam in my visibility and it was exciting and beautiful. And now I'm in this place of.
Returning to the craft. And the craft is supporting people one-on-one and in groups. So I've just completed Circle Craft, which was a beautiful group program for folks who identify as aspiring or current tenders of circle, community leaders, folks who want to create a deeper sense of the
village again in these modern times. And we had an incredible, incredible cohort. And I learned so so much from doing it and I will do it again, probably this fall, if you aren't on my email list, beckapaustralia.com slash subscribe, I highly recommend you get on that, I don't email too much, if you're interested in CircleCraft. And then the other offering I've just started doing is getting back into one-on-one mentorship and support. And this is with my threshold sessions.
So this is specifically for folks who are in the deep experience of a transition in their lives, a rite of passage, if you will. It's really for helping people who are in the experience of the liminal. So if you're familiar with rites of passage, also I will link to an episode I did a while ago on rites of passage if you're curious about learning more. There are three phases to a rite of passage. The first phase is the separation.
And this is when a catalyst, something happens in your life that sets off a series of things that make you realize, oh, I'm changing, something is changing. And that thrusts you into the messy middle, which is the liminal phase. That is where you aren't who you were before, but you have not yet entered into who you're becoming. And the third phase is the return where you feel fully stepping into and seen as changed in some way.
And we live in a society where the liminal is just like kind of unacknowledged, unsupported, and often feels really hard. If you're on my email list, I emailed about a month ago about how I have been in realizing the familiarity of feeling sort of unmoored and confused and wishing I could just rip the Band-Aid off and get to the other side.
And this has been with the very slow process of migrating my family from California to upstate New York, to the farm we purchased, and to literally completely transforming our lives from suburban tech San Francisco people to farm people. I don't know if we're gonna be farm people, but we're gonna be different people. And I realized pretty, it took a while, But then I realized, oh, I'm in the liminal. I'm feeling really uncomfortable. I'm feeling really disoriented. And so.
I've been getting support in that way. And so now that I feel really supported, I'm remembering my gift and my training in supporting other folks. So I am offering the threshold sessions. It's three sessions, more if you need it, supporting folks who. Desire witnessing, soul-tending, logistical support, and assistance in ritual creation and to help them navigate the life transitions they're going through.
So if you are curious about that, you can go to BeccaPiastrelli.com slash threshold, one word, and you can learn more about that. I'm booking, I have just four spots because I'm trying to keep it in integrity as far as my time and energy. And I have three spots left for this summer. So if you're finding yourself navigating big transformational experiences that you're actually finding like able to name, like, oh, I am crossing over the threshold of becoming a parent.
Maybe you've recently experienced grief. Maybe you're having a shift in identity that feels like earth-shaking, soul-quaking. Maybe it's a career shift or a shift in your body, maybe navigating menopause or perimenopause. I would love to support you in that way. So again, you can go to beccapiestrelli.com slash threshold. Okay, now let's talk about summer. Summer is when I usually dip out, as they say.
Summer has a similar vibe as winter, but just like opposite in that there is a slowing down, energy with the solstice. So I love to talk about winter. I think that's because we live in a society that tries to have us all move too quickly through winter. And as someone who has really identified with experiences of inner winter, experiences of needing to go within, experiences of needing to slow down, winter has really resonated.
And I've also seen how summer gives that similar sense of wanting to not be on a computer, of wanting to be away and be with myself and be with the earth, and it just looks a little different. I don't feel like hibernating in the summer, but I certainly feel like. Playing and it's like a doing energy that honors the literal life-giving force in the sky that is.
The sun. So if you work with earth medicine or anything that connects the energies of, all that is with the seasons, you probably know that the summer really holds the energy of the south on the medicine wheel, the element of fire in the archetypes of the feminine, that of the mother, the full moon when it comes to the phases of the moon, the ripened fruit on the vine.
Summer always feels like a tomato that's about to burst on the vine. In the winter, It was just a seed being held in the darkness. In the spring, it was planted and sprouted. And then towards the end of spring and into summer, the flower blooms and then the fruit emerges and ripens. And then in the fall, it is harvested and nourished.
So there's this real sense of the fullness, the full ripened fruit of our bodies, whether that's with a baby or with the nourishment of the land, or with the fullness of heart. There's a real element of celebrating with summer that feels like the ancestral relief of life thriving. So there's like the prayers of getting through winter. Oh my gosh, like, will we have enough food?
It's really quite intense. And then the deep, deep work that comes with planting in spring, the prayers and the blessings and the work and the attention that comes with spring, which is why I often do most of my work in the spring and then in the harvest time of fall. And in the summer, it's like you still have to work. I always think about it from an agrarian perspective of our ancestors that tended to the land, all of which have that in our.
Many millions of ancestor lineage. Relying on the land to feed our bodies and continue life. This real sense this summer of seeing the plants growing, of seeing the fruits ripen, and being like, woo, what a miracle. At the same time, mid-summer is a real time when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and its fullest expression of light. What do we know summer solstice to be but the longest day of the year or the shortest night of the year in your hemisphere.
And so there's a real exhale of the earth, but also a real revealing of oneself, right? Like the light is shining down on us all and giving us life. And so I'll talk a bit in a moment about energy management during the summer. But there's this real balance in the summer of hard work and rest. I think about the slumbering lion in the heat of the day. Like summer is a real nap heavy.
I think about all my ancestors who probably woke up early with the sun up early and tended to the fields and their plants and their animals. And then when the sun is too hot, taking rest, taking refuge under the shade of a tree, drinking nourishing cold tonics to restore their energy from all the sweat and salt leaving their bodies. So that they could work a bit more and then celebrate with their community into the evening as the sun showed them and lighted the path in that way.
So how can we take this ancestral energy of hard work and rest—oh, I have a note here about hard work and rest being the time of the mother. Actually when I was preparing, I just have notes and notes and notes from courses and books I've taken and just like my own meditative channeling, I had this realization about Summer. I, as you know, am a mother of a young child. And I know that Summer has the archetype of the mother, whether you have a child or not, that energy of the mother.
And I equated that with the other energy of just like, working hard and resting and seeing how, oh, the time of the mother is what I've realized, in my own experience of mothering in this time, the year 2023, is in order to really thrive in motherhood. A mother must learn to balance hard work and rest or we burn out or we get sick.
I've been deep in my own sort of postpartum depletion recovery these past few months since I weaned from breastfeeding, and I've realized how much the giving of my body, the giving of my energy with sleeplessness, the giving of my attention with love, oh my gosh, with just such love, that sacrifice, devotion, energy to a child. And this can be equated to a project, to a community.
How if I don't pause and rest, if I don't take the moments of support to nap, to rest, to sit, to stretch, to move, to eat well and nourish my body, how I will not thrive. My tomato would wither on the vine. And so that has been such a beautiful way for me to look at how Summer is a teacher the mother in us all, no matter how we identify and no matter if we have children or not.
There is a lesson for all of us who are recovering from or trying to navigate in a system that is about constant production, hustling hard, basically asking us to ignore our body signs for needing rest and nourishment. And it's always, I remember, you know, as a child, I would always have summer off from school. And I remember in my 20s feeling very bitter. That we were still expected to work at our jobs. I mean, depending on your job,
I worked in corporate technology marketing, San Francisco. I'd still have to work during the summer. It felt unfair. It felt wrong to my body to have to go into an office under, I mean, it was like an air conditioned office under fluorescent lighting and not honor or my, you know, inner wild creature that maybe what if I could have woken up with the sun and done some work ideally outside and then taken siesta? Oh yeah, and then I remember I traveled
to Europe in my 20s and I was like, siesta, that is a thing. That's so aligned with what our bodies need. So I know not all of us have so much choice in the ways we can navigate summer, but what can we incorporate into it, at least in the spaces that we have choice or we have wiggle room. And that is garden time. Can you get out and work your own land? Even though the majority of us, if not all of us, are not subsistence farmers, right?
Like I get most of my food from a local grocery store, but there is that joyful element in the summer, whether it's a container garden or a community garden, or you go to the farmer's market or you have a garden, of growing food or plants that nourish you in some way in some way and then taking that in to your body.
I feel as though in the spring and summer and fall, the garden metaphors are just like coming out of a fire hose, like weeding, pruning, like, oh, weeding the things in my life, pruning the things in my life, fertilizing the soil, spacing plants apart. All of these things are like, oh, where can I space things apart in my schedule? Where can I fertilize my own soil? Am I not watering the plants of my life enough? Where am I over-watering the plants of my life?
A pest takes down like, God, I got some major aphid action last summer and just couldn't help but feel like, oh, where is my ecosystem not diversified enough so that one pest could take down a whole block of plants in my life? So there's something about the slowing down nature of summer rather than the sort of fierce planting of spring and the wild harvesting of autumn
where we can be receptive to those messages and that wisdom. Other ancestral practices we can work into our experience of summer is sharing the bounty at our tables and with our community. Do any of you have like lemon trees that just go nuts, you know, or an overabundance of a certain plant and there is that inner desire to share. Can you give it to a neighbor? Can you have people over? This is like the dream, right?
To have a dinner where everyone brings food from their garden that they have extra of and there is an exchange. Or what is, if you don't have a garden that's producing a lot of lemon balm or many roses to be picked and shared or a lot of lemons, like what is that? How else can you express the sharing of your bounty at the community table in your life? I'm so curious about what could come up for each of us and how we could do that.
Going to the farmer's market and getting a flat of cherries and sharing them with the neighbor kids, Like, how is it we can be in that expression of abundance that Summer shares with us? It's also a great time for making medicine, whether you have, you know, an herbal thumb or not. I find there's just so many resources online and books for ways to. Be with what is in abundance, what is growing, whether it's wild or foraged in some way.
I have calendula everywhere. This is, ah, calendula is such an abundance plant, beautiful yellow flower. And it so easily reseeds when the flowers dry, the seeds just like, I love it. They're like little curly cues, but they almost look like tiny little caterpillars and they fall and re-seed so easily. And the more you cut the flowers on a calendula plant, the more it blooms.
And I think about just the ease of thriving and the beauty and bursting of the yellow sunshiny petals, how just life-giving it is. So I do a lot of calendula work. I put those, they're edible petals, so I put that in my salads. I put it in my water. I put it in my bathtub. And I also, I have seen so many herbalists have winter remedies that capture the blooming flowers of calendula, like bottle sunshine.
So maybe look into making a calendula essence, a calendula tincture, something that you can preserve or even a glycerin for the winter when there is less sun. And that you do feel that impact of less sun on your skin and your eyeballs and how you can take in that abundant sunshine energy of calendula from the summer before, summers before. I have one right behind me. I'm gonna take it right now. This is from North Sea Medicine Collective. I think that's Mila Prince, woman who married the bear.
Sunshine in a bottle, calendula tincture. Gentle immune support, digestive aid, empathic listening and openness to others' experience. All right, I'm gonna take it. Mm, so light, so mm, like effervescent. Makes me feel, yeah, lightness and ease in my body. So let's talk about some ritual aspects that have to do with this midsummer, whether you want to celebrate the solstice, which when I release this episode is coming up, Or all summer long, because just because you don't do.
Like let's say a bonfire and a ritual on the summer solstice, you can do it a week, a month later. Summer is a whole season. I find some of us with our Western minds can feel like, oh, dang it, I missed out on the ritual. Oh, well, and it's like, no, no. These seasons and their medicine are here for all of us. So fire is a, right, fire is a big element. heat, the south, that is a big element that comes into play in the summer for a lot of
traditions and lineages, and not all, I will say, not all. And so bonfire into the night feels like taking the sun out of the sky and bringing it on earth as a gift to all, as a way to keep warm, as a way to feel a wildness, celebration. So bonfires are a big part of summer. Don't you create a bonfire with a roasting marshmallows or singing around a bonfire? That just feels like
such a part of summer. So you can be with fire outside, ideally safely. That is like such a simple, accessible, and yet deep and potent ritual, for summer. So let's talk about yin and yang energy. So these are Eastern-based phrases, Asian-based phrases to talk about energies in the body.
I don't know if you know about yin energy being sort of maybe applied to, this is a binary, but this is where we've learned and come from, I'm sure the language will change over time, but this yin energy of really being receptive energy, maybe feminine energy, moon-like energy, slower pace, rest, and restorative. And then yang energy is much more of like a fire, traditionally masculine, sort of like pointing the arrow
and releasing it, high energy movement. And so summer really brings the yang energy, whereas winter really brings the yin energy and so, I find that in summer, you can see perhaps where you're out of balance in one of those. So if the yang is super overactive or the fire energy is super overactive. I'm going to get faint, overheated, exhausted, even sick. I've ever gotten summer colds.
There is a way in which we have to balance, right? Hard work and rest, the time of the mother in the in the summer, where if we push it too hard in the summer, our bodies will say too much yang. In the same way, a bit of movement in the summer is very, very healing to the parts of ourselves that maybe feel overly in, perhaps.
That sense of not feeling like a lot of movement can happen in your body, not feeling very inspired, that sort of like lion laying in the sun all day, all night, There's a way in which hydration, working with plants like hibiscus and mint and things like that that can move energy a bit in your body slowly so that you can be dancing around the fire. There are three plants that I really love and feel supportive to me with the balancing of the yin and yang energy in the summer, and that is rose.
Rose lemonade. grinding up roses into your margarita salt, rose baths, rose hibiscus tea, rose everywhere all the time. My roses just started blooming and I'll have to leave them here in California. And so this is the last summer bloom of my roses and I am just like loving them, and appreciating them, bowing to them. Another one is mugwort. Mugwort with its silvery under the leaves.
Artemisia vulgaris, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, very summer sort of young energy, and mugwort is also a dreaming plant. So I find that there's space for dreaminess in summer, a lot like there is in winter, winter the dream time. You can burn mugwort, you can harvest mugwort, and then wrap it up into bundles and dry it to burn throughout the year, put it in your bonfires, lay it around your altars. And I'm wondering what plants feel like summer to you. What is thriving in your bio region?
Is it the citrus? Is it the fruit? Is it the beautiful dahlias that you've planted? Is it the rhododendron? Like what is speaking to you right now? Because I share those plants. Also mint, I will say mint. Mint feels like an easy go-to for herbal waters. And my daughter just loves the mint, just chews on the mint all summer long. But what matters is what you feel connected to. So these, I really feel strongly that I don't wanna be seen as the person who tells you how to do seasonal rituals,
particularly because we all come from different lineages. Much of that connection has been lost. Some of it has been reclaimed or preserved in some way. And I really think it's important for each of us to connect to our experience of a season in our bodies on the lands we call home now.
Given our life experience, I think there's a way in which those of us who are in this reclaiming space of ancestral connection and earth connection can feel like it's wrong to be in this technological time, 2023, and that somehow what we're doing is just like not as sacred as what was once done. There's that romanticizing of times past. And I just want
to remind us all that we are also living in a sacred time. And what will our descendants, whether by blood or by legacy or by story, what will they say about us and what we did and how we gathered, and what we struggled with, and what we suffered through, and what we triumphed through. What stories will they tell around their fires, however the earth looks at that time? You are the ritualist. You are the myth maker. You are the storyteller of your time.
And so what is your experience in your body of summer? What are the plants that speak to you, even if they are suburban, planted from the local garden center. That matters. It all matters.
And it tunes us into a different way of reconnecting, embodying, embodiment, embodying, the whole experience of being alive on this, I'm gonna say it again, freaking miracle planet in this time and space and universe that is just baffling and humbling and, incredible that we have this life and these all these circumstances that have happened over millions of years have led to this one life.
And so, may you bring that into your experience of summer, and may you celebrate in all the ways that you can. And if your inner seasons feel different from summer, take care with that first. As someone who, two summers ago, was in an inner winter and felt like I was just missing out on all the fun because I had so much to tend to inside, that is okay. The wheel turns again and again and again, and the medicine of summer is always here for you.
So I leave that there with you, and then I have one final announcement, which is this is the last episode of the Belonging Podcast for a while dot dot dot. I, I am moving. Been telling you about it for a while. I need the summer to keep focusing on nourishing the roots of my body. That's a tree metaphor, but really tending to my health. I've been really working to strengthen it after having some pretty devastating immune system stuff happen to me over the past two seasons.
And also I need to take some things off my plate. So that I can prepare to move this fall. This podcast, I have been doing for five years. So we're saying we're closing season one after five years and 380,000 downloads. Thank you everyone for your listen and your support. Thank you to everyone who donated to the tip jar over the last year. That was very appreciated and helpful. And also, a lot has gone into this podcast. I have a team that supports it.
I take a lot of time and care in the interviews that I do and the preparations and the editing team, Amelia Ruby at Softer Sounds. Before that, it was Caitlin Bream. Now the support of my assistant, Angela Howard. And I'm thinking myself, I'm just thinking about that meme with Snoop Dogg. I wanna thank me. I do want to thank me. And also I need to find a way to do a podcast that costs me less money and less energy. So that is. Something maybe not everyone talks about. Podcasts are,
wonderful things we put out to the world and oftentimes there is a financial and time cost. And I know that there are many people who really love this podcast. So it is my hope to come back in a... If there's anything you know about me is I'm constantly shifting, changing, and innovating and channeling my creativity. So I love sharing my voice. I love talking into the microphone. I love interviewing people.
And I'm taking some very conscious time to take care of the things I need to take care of and then hopefully come back in new, more sustainable ways. So the best way to keep in touch with me is my newsletter, which comes out one to two times a month. It's called Slow and Seasonal. And you can subscribe by going to beckapaestrelli.com slash subscribe. I am doing threshold sessions. So anyone who would like to work one-on-one with me,
I'd love to support you. You can go to beckapaestrelli.com slash threshold. And here and there on Instagram, love-hate relationship. Sometimes I'm posting and sometimes I'm not. And there's an archive, five years of archives of the episodes. And also you can probably listen to me grow through a major rite of passage.
You could literally track me through wanting to have a baby, miscarriages, a pregnancy in lockdown, my birth story, how it impacted my marriage, delayed postpartum depression, my discovery of mushrooms in supporting that, and here I am now. And then along the way, some really powerful conversations with incredible, wise, super cool people. So with that, I'll complete. I am endlessly grateful to you for your support and your listening.
And hopefully I'll see you on my newsletter, in my inbox, or on social media, or back here when I return in the spiral of time that is what I'm trying to exist in. Okay, lots of love to you, bye. Thank you so much for joining me. In a time when our attention is being pulled in so many different directions, it means a lot that you took time out of your day to spend it with me and in these important conversations.
For show notes and links and more information about my guests, you can head to belongingpodcast.com. And if you'd like to hear more from me and get access to my free newsletter called Slow and Seasonal, you can head to beckapiestrelli.com slash subscribe.