Hello friend,
As the dark days draw in around us Northern Hemisphere folk, we’d love to share this end-of-year closing practice we’ve been experimenting with.
Around now, there’s often pressure to metabolise the year into neat learnings and resolutions - but this offering resists that impulse. It brings attention to what’s coming back to ground - with no expectations of what it might become.
A practice for closing the year
Lay out four cards in four directions around a space: The Harvest, The Compost, Mulching, Fallowing.*
Gather your participants and invite them to reflect: what are you laying down at the end of this year? What is ending for you? To aid this, try a solo journaling practice or active listening in pairs.
If you can do this in an outdoor nature setting, invite people to find the dark, decomposing, fallow places and do their journaling or pairs work there.
Try to resist any impulse to turn this into the next thing: learnings, “seeds” or green shoots for next year. Practice just being with what is ending or needs to end. (This is surprisingly hard to do!)
Now: invite people to consider “how can I do this work of laying down what needs to be left?” The cards provide the “how”. Invite them to move around the circle, choosing the card corner that feels most natural to them. Get them to explain their orientation.
Now, invite them to move again, this time going towards the card that they feel most resistant to. Invite explanation. Why not this? In speaking, does anything shift in the qualities of their ending?
*if you don’t have the cards, you can also just write these titles across the space.
A snapshot of recent Tending to Endings team practices.
Have you developed your own way of using the cards? Hit reply and tell us. We’re developing facilitation instructions and would love to include approaches that are already working in our community!
What we’ve been up to…
We’ve had a busy few months.
Heather has been co-guiding the second season of Wintering, which invites folks around Bristol, UK to spend winter in community with wild land - this podcast ep explains it beautifully. In November, she facilitated a collective compost ritual as part of the journey.
The cards also inspired a workshop, ‘The Regenerative Reset: The Composting Ground’, where Heather and Jessica Ferrow welcomed 16 business leaders to reflect on endings.
In November, Heather and Ally were at the Ethical Assembly summit in Lisbon, where the theme was ‘Composting 2025 and Seeding New Positive Futures’. Ally delivered a keynote talk exploring ‘the ecology of endings’, whilst Heather hosted a compost workshop at permaculture farm Quinta Kismet.
Scenes from November’s composting practices.
Ally shares the cards on the big screen at Ethical Assembly.
We joined our friends Happy Museum Project for a workshop using the cards to tackle challenges in the cultural heritage sector (read more here).
Ally joined Manda Scott on the Accidental Gods podcast to talk about weaving wilder stories and how Tending to Endings came into being.
Finally, if you’re curious about the background to this project and how it’s developed, we’ve published a deeper dive with the wonderful Collective Imagination Practice Community who seed-funded this project in 2024.
Upcoming happenings…
If you’re looking to attune more deeply into winter’s medicine … Ally is returning to co-guide Becoming Crew’s beloved peer learning adventure Into the Dark, which runs for 5 weeks from January - a plunge into the fertile dark, in a close knit container. Register here: https://www.becomingcrew.com/intothedark
We’re so excited to bring more offerings and an evolved pack to our community next year. For now, though: we’re going fallow. We’ll be back in late January so might be slower to respond before then.
Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us this year. For now, here’s to deep rest and good soil.
We’ll see you all in 2026.
Ally, Heather, Will x