Seasonal Threshold's

Service Description

Loss, in its many forms, is part of being human. We will all experience times when we lose people we love, things we love, and parts of our lives that have mattered to us. Some losses will be profound and change our lives forever. Others may be less visible to the outside world, but that doesn't mean they haven't affected us. Someone we loved may have died years ago, and there may still be something about them, or our relationship with them, that we want to honour. We might leave a job and only later recognise that we also left behind an identity, a sense of purpose or a community of people. Friendships can fade away or end painfully. Relationships end, children leave home, we move through menopause, sell homes that have held important chapters of our lives, or realise that a dream we once held for ourselves is no longer going to happen. And, of course, sometimes we're the ones who decide to leave, to change, to say enough, or to choose something different. There can be a real both/and in this. We can know that something needed to end and still grieve its ending. We can be grateful for what something brought into our lives and recognise what it cost us, and we can miss someone or something and still know that we don't want them, or it, back. I have come to believe that a part of honouring an ending is allowing all of those things to sit alongside one another, and for me the seasons offer a natural opportunity to do this. Each year, we cross the seasonal threshold into autumn. What has flourished through spring and summer begins to slow and let go. And those fallen leaves don't simply disappear; they return to the earth, break down and nourish the soil, becoming part of the next cycle of growth. I love this as a way of thinking about our own endings. Not that we have to find a positive in everything that has happened to us, or quickly turn loss into a lesson, but that we can take time to acknowledge what something has meant, what it has changed, what we want to keep and what we feel ready to release. Autumn gives us a natural threshold at which to pause and honour an ending from our own lives, whether recent or long past, chosen or unchosen, acknowledged or unacknowledged. Honouring Endings is an evening to make some space for that. We'll take time to acknowledge the people, relationships, places, roles, dreams and chapters of our lives that have ended or changed.