The Grief Almanac
Welcome.
Here you’ll find seasonal reflections, rituals, practices, playlists, and curated art — each one an invitation into deeper relationship with the cycles of the earth and your own experience of grief.
Whether you are grieving a death, the loss of health, identity, relationship, community, or a future you had already begun to imagine, you are welcome here.
The Grief Almanac honours grief in all its forms. This is a non-hierarchical space. No loss is ranked above another.
This is not a guide to getting over grief.
It’s an invitation to deepen your relationship with it. To honour the ways grief continues to shape and transform you, and to tend the life that still lives alongside it. Through the turning seasons, we’ll explore what it means to live with grief rather than beyond it.
My hope is for this Grief Almanac to become a companion through the turning of the year. A place to gather tools and practices you can carry into the coming month. A gentle reminder that grief is both devastating and, at the same time, a doorway into a depth of living that wasn’t available to us before.
What is the Wheel of the Year?
The Wheel of the Year marks the changing seasons through eight festivals honouring the turning of the earth. Rooted in ancient folk traditions, it invites us into relationship with cycles of growth, harvest, decline, and rest.
Rather than moving in a straight line, life moves in seasons. The earth doesn’t stay in perpetual spring, and it doesn’t stay in winter forever. Each season carries its own particular wisdom.
Paying attention to these cycles, we begin to notice the quieter shifts happening within us too, and to develop a more reciprocal relationship with the natural world.
How Does It Relate to Grief?
Grief moves in cycles too.
We often expect it to follow a clear path toward resolution. But many of us find that grief behaves more like the seasons than like a journey with a fixed destination. The trees offer us something here: barrenness is not the absence of life. Even in winter, unseen processes continue beneath the bark and deep within the roots.
The Wheel of the Year offers a way of keeping grief company that honours this. It holds grief as a living relationship, one that changes and deepens over time rather than simply fading.
Through seasonal reflections, rituals, creative practices, and stories, The Grief Almanac explores what it means to live with grief as part of the natural world. Together, we tend the losses we carry, and stay open to what they might yet teach us.
Autumn Equinox
“Autumn and grief mirror one another. Ultimately, this is a season of loss. A time with an essence of hollowing, of beginning the emptying process.”
Winter Solstice
“Historically, the Solstice marked the longest night and the fragile promise of returning light. When we live in the realm of grief, allowing light back in can feel unexpectedly difficult.”
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Written by Madeleine Alice