Speaker 1: [00:00:00] The last piece in this series on slowing down in order to be more complete and full in your business is about moving through different seasons of service. This idea was first presented to me by one of my teachers. Her name is Lindsay Mack and she is a tarot reader and teacher and wonderful.
She has a podcast that's called Tarot for the Wild Soul that I fully recommend listening to if you're interested in these kinds of things. The idea of seasons of service is that we move through different seasons in our life and in our business in particular projects and in things that we do. You can think of it like the seasons of the year. There is this season of spring, which is the time for working the soil and for planting the seeds for really tending the earth.
You can think about seeds as like the ideas that are going to be moving through the process of blooming and fruiting and harvest throughout the rest of the year. In summer, summer is like this beautiful time where everything is in full bloom, where the seeds that we have [00:02:00] planted and have been tending are really starting to show the work that we have been putting into them, they're flowering, they're fruiting, they're just wonderful and the fruitful part of the year.
The fall is the time of the harvest. That's when the fruit has become ripe, we're picking it. We are deciding which pieces of fruit we're keeping and which ones we're composting and which ones we're throwing away. It's like this season of sorting through what we have grown.
There's this aspect of you don't just keep growing, you don't just plant a seed and grow and plant and grow but you go through this season of looking at the fruits that have come from your work and deciding which ones you're going to keep that you're going to draw new seeds from and plant in the next year in the next season and which ones you're not going to work with anymore.
Of those, some will be composted and will become the soil for the next year's harvest. Some will be burned or thrown away or destroyed in some way because they're not-- you don't want them to become a part of what you grow in the future.
Then there's the season of winter. In winter, we allow the ground to just lie fallow. We just let it be. We let it rest and regenerate. [00:04:00] We spend time indoors. We, maybe during our harvest season, like canned or put some food away for the winter.
We are using the things that we have saved and the resources that we have available in this time so that we can rest. This time of rest is an important part of that cycle of the year. In our work, we can find ourselves in different seasons at the same time. We can be planting a seed in one area and harvesting in another area and wintering in a different area.
Also throughout the course of our year, we can choose times to focus on the activities of the different seasons. One thing that I did this year was I separated out my business calendar according to the Zodiac science because for me that is meaningful, it brings meaning to each month, and the projects that I choose for a given month and the things that I talk about in a given month.
Within each season, I make space for the springtime, the summertime, the harvest time and the wintertime. I build in some of this into each season. Then, in the course of the year, for me, it's most important to look at creating winters for myself, creating winters and summers. Spaces where there's not so [00:06:00] much, like on my end, the responsibility of creation.
Because I am definitely a creator, and I will just like keep creating things all the time. I need to build in time to not do that, to just chill. I think there's a metaphor that I want to bring in with these seasons of service and the waiting and the time of planting and the seeds and all of the things because I'm also a ceramic artist. Ceramic sounds like so fancy. I'm a potter.
I make things that people like drink out of and eat out of. There's a really wonderful process to ceramics. First of all, because it is a lifelong apprenticeship. I talked about gardening being a lifelong apprenticeship. Ceramics is another one. I think music is another one.
When I began, I made a lot of things and I also threw-- I didn't throw them away because, clay, you could put water back in it and reuse it, but I destroyed many of the things that I created when I first was learning how to be a Potter. I recently went through a period where I started making things again. I kept one out of maybe every five things that I made because I wanted to put that clay back into the bag, so that as my hands and my body remembered the skills, I would be able to use [00:08:00] that clay for other pieces that would be more lovely.
Because I want to make things that are lovely and beautiful and that bring people joy and that people want to like hold in their hands. Part of that, it was this process of making it and looking at it and being like, "Okay, do I like this one or not?" In that moment, right after I made it, sometimes I was like, "No, I don't like this one. I'm going to put that one back in the bag."
Then other times, as I spent more time with the pieces, they sat on the shelf that I waited a week before I looked at them again and all these things, then I would pick out other ones where I was, like, "No, these aren't great." I don't want to keep this one, I want to keep this other one.
At one point, the cat made some decisions for me, which was great because I really shouldn't have kept those pieces but I was going to, and it reminded me of this lesson. The lesson of sorting through and putting away returning to the soil the things that are not right for this time but that are the fertilizer and the ground for the next iteration of things.
I hope that is helpful to you or at least maybe a little bit interesting or a different way of looking at the responsibilities of being a business owner and how you can make decisions around how you are spending your time through the course of the calendar year.
[00:09:57] [END OF AUDIO]
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