Take a minute to look out your window — what signs of seasonal change are present? 

Whether it's changing leaves, a shift in how the daylight hits your office space, or a change in your schedule as school starts again, there’s a transition happening as we move into late fall in the Northern Hemisphere. 

At the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network (WFAN), we’re welcoming this new season by celebrating the publishing of Stories of the Seasons: A Women, Food, and Agriculture Network  Zine. This project is a collection of dispatches from the seasons, and it has us thinking a lot about seasonal living and how we honor transitions in our lives. 

Read on to understand how seasonal living impacts our work, and exercises for deepening this practice in your own life.

As a midwesterner, fall is earmarked first by the equinox, then by the vibrant colors of changing leaves, and finally by the hard frost that signals an end to the growing season. For me, and many of the farmers and land caretakers that I work with at the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network, this frost is a relief. 

The shift into fall marks a change in work patterns, moving us from a time of summer abundance and busyness to a season of rest, reflection, and rooting to prepare for the year ahead. But you don’t have to be a farmer to live and work in tune with the seasons! 

Identifying how seasonal shifts impact your work

Often it can feel like we let time happen ‘to’ us, but rarely have a chance to be present in honoring the passing of time. This feeling is amplified when we spend the majority of our days inside at our computers! 

To explore how seasons come into your life, I invite you to grab a piece of paper and jot down some thoughts and doodles about the following questions: 

1. What seasonal cues are showing up in my world? (these don’t have to be related to nature, but they can be!) 

2. When in the year does my workload feel easeful? When does my work feel busy? 

3. How do I visualize the shape of a year? (make a drawing!) 
   
   

Planning your work (and life!) with the seasons in mind

Working seasonally encourages us to: 

• slow down our pace

• find presence in our work

• reflect on our experiences

This fall, our Zine Team attended the Focused Seasonal Planning session hosted by Kaila. During this session, we zoomed out to celebrate our wins from the summer and looked ahead to the work on our plates for the next three months. 

From these reflections, I realized that the summer season feels super busy to me with work, personal life, and my (often out-of-control!) garden. As I looked at the months ahead, I made a note to prioritize my emotional wellness through mindfulness meditations and time outside. These practices help me refill my cup after a season of social time and big creative projects (like our zine!). 

When we can find a balance between our energy levels and our workloads, we can make magic happen! 

5 other ways to slow down into a season

🥕 Learn what produce is in season where you live, and make a seasonally inspired meal! 

✍️ Take some time each season to reflect on how you’re feeling and what you’re grateful for — try using this Focused Gratitude worksheet! 

🕯️ Build your own seasonal practice — this can be as simple as lighting a candle on the solstice. 

🎧 Make a seasonally inspired playlist, or tune into this one, sourced by our Zine Team! 

🌳 Find a place in nature near you that you can visit throughout the year, and document the changes you observe in a photo journal or poem.

1. Zine contributor Geneva Toland witnessed the changing seasons and developed a bond with the plants and animals who make their homes at Ada Hayden Park. This practice inspired her to create a poem chronicling her encounters at Ada Hayden from the 2023 fall equinox to the 2024 spring equinox. Read it here! 
   
   

Stories of the Seasons: an experiment in seasonal noticing

This year, we asked the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network: 

How do you live well in the places you love? What stories do you tell to mark the circle of a year? 

The answers to these questions became Stories of the Seasons: A WFAN Zine. This zine is a tributary of a larger Stories of the Seasons project and an experiment in seasonal living, curated by 40 contributors from across the country.

The zine holds songs, poems, recipes, artwork, and guidance for tapping into the rhythms of the seasons. Our team spent the summer collecting, curating, and editing the 90+ pages of goodness in the Stories of the Seasons zine, and as we pass into fall in the Northern Hemisphere, our zine is finally ready to share with the world. You can grab a copy of Stories of the Seasons here, and cozy up with this seasonal field guide all winter long. 

The encouragement of the Focused Space community helped bring this zine project to life! Our team spent countless hours reviewing submissions, editing zine drafts, and designing our final product in virtual community with other Focused Space members. As a small, fully remote team, we were able to stay connected and collaborate on the creative elements of this project through our Focused for Teams membership.

Each day, I would post my tasks in our Focused Team dashboard, and the rest of my team could see what I was up to. This eliminated unnecessary emails and meetings, and helped us stay on track for our publishing date. It feels extra special to share this finished product with Focused Space, after working on it during so many community sessions!

And finally….. A seasonal playlist!

We at WFAN love playlists almost as much as Focused Space… so when we made our zine, we had to create a playlist to go with it! This playlist is lovingly sourced by our zine editing team and meets us in the beauty of autumn, pulling us through the rhythms of the seasons to mark the circle of a year. We hope you can enjoy this mix as you prepare for frost, reflect on last season, and honor the waning daylight. 

About the Women, Food, and Agriculture Network

The Women, Food, and Agriculture Network is a national community of food growers and land stewards who have been historically excluded from access to education, infrastructure, and support networks in agriculture. For nearly 30 years, we have supported producers, land caretakers, and policy advocates in the shaping of an ecologically and socially just food and farming system. We lean on art and storytelling as revolutionary tools that help us build collective power within our network. Learn more about us here.

Want more? Try these seasonal prompts to carry through your year

This zine follows the seasons of the year, with the addition of a few extra seasons that emerged from our submissions. Below, we have attached prompts that you can lean on to bring you back into presence with the season at hand. 

Tip: add these prompts to your calendar to greet you throughout the year, and remind you to slow down and honor the season!

Begin: What ‘beginnings’ are you celebrating right now? 

Spring: What seeds are you planting in your work and your personal life? 

Summer: What is blooming in your life right now? What’s blooming outside your window? How does summer feel in your body? 

Interlude: What is a sight, sound, smell, taste, or feeling that is telling you we are in the transition between summer and fall?

Fall: What are you composting to make room for something new? And/or what are you storing up for winter?

Winter: How are you honoring this season of hibernation? What does rest look like in winter?