Nature’s Wild Side

Cycles can appear deceptively tidy, but embracing nature’s messier side is essential to partnering with nature for personal and collective regeneration.

Partnering with nature’s cycles is a powerful way to support our well-being and cultivate more regenerative ways of working and leading, so that we can thrive as we bring our bold visions for systemic change to life.

But there’s a major truth that many of us can overlook as we start working with cycles.

The truth? Nature is wild, ruthless, messy and yep, even absolutely disgusting at times.

So let’s talk about why embracing this truth is so important if you want to truly align with nature in your leadership, work and life.

Our culture LOVES to portray nature as tidy, nice, calm, and relaxing.

But that’s not the whole story. Things in nature also explode, erupt, collapse, decay and ooze. 

Why is this? Well, those processes create and sustain life. They keep life humming on earth.

Life-generating processes are messy. 

It’s true for all of nature’s cycles. It’s true for your creative work. And it’s true for every goopy caterpillar who ever became a butterfly. 

I see this in real time each spring when my entire neighborhood is coated in a yellow-green film of oak tree pollen. While my body doesn’t always react well to this annual event, I know the abundant bright green “mess” is bursting with wild, creative, life-generating possibility. Given that many species on our planet are struggling to survive as a result of human-caused environmental destruction and climate change, I’m increasingly here for this kind of mess.

This is the same kind of “mess” that is required whether we want to regenerate an ecosystem, birth a new idea or initiative, build trust within our teams, or even recover from burnout.

On the surface, nature’s cycles can seem tidy.

Four organized seasons, all in a predictable order. It can give us the illusion of neatness and control. But it’s not the whole story.

Consider how the seasons are shifting as a result of climate change. Or how the menstrual cycle–one of nature’s most essential regenerative cycles–goes through a huge (and often disorienting) recalibration during perimenopause.

The power of working with cycles isn’t just about learning the existing patterns in nature. It’s about building the skills to recognize patterns, so that you can strategically adapt when things inevitably change. It’s about understanding the role of the seeming “messiness” in generating and sustaining life, so you can partner with it–and even replicate it–to steward regeneration through your own creative processes.

To receive the full benefits of partnering with nature, we have to embrace it all–the tidy and the messy. Because the more taboo qualities are an essential part of any regenerative cycle.

Nature’s messy side holds powerful lessons for us.

Here are a few of my favorite ones:

1. Perfectionism and control have no place in nature. They’re only “natural” to extractive systems and cultures. To truly align yourself and the way you work + lead with nature, you have to let go of control and make room for wildness.

➜ In your leadership, this can look like encouraging more collaboration and outside-the-box thinking, or skillfully adapting when circumstances change.

2. To birth something new (like radical social change), we have to be willing to get messy first. The first phase of every natural cycle involves abundant–and seemingly excessive–creativity before a natural filtering / discernment process kicks in. This is how new lifecycles are initiated.

➜ At work, make space for creative exploration when starting something new to help surface the unexpected solutions we need to disrupt the status quo.

3. All sides of ourselves, each other and the natural world are vital. It’s easy to love and respect the nice, tidy sides. But nature is showing us we have to do the same for the messy, ugly, and counter-cultural sides, because they too have their place and function. Rather than fighting these aspects, we can start with getting curious about what role they’re here to play.

➜ In your leadership, this might be expressing your grief or anger about the harm done to our planet as a way to honor these parts of yourself and invite your colleagues to show up as their whole selves too.

It’s easy to misinterpret cycles when we’re looking through the lens of social conditioning that values control and order.

But working with cycles isn’t about exchanging one rigid structure for another to optimize ourselves into productivity machines. 

Yes, they offer us a framework for bringing more ease into our work and life.

The bigger picture, though, is that working with cycles is a pathway back to our wholeness and interconnectedness, so we can become life-generating leaders. I.e. Leaders who know how to create the conditions for regeneration in themselves, their communities and on earth.

And life? Well, it’s messy. 

When we understand why, we can start learning how to work skillfully with the mess to create more life, vitality and aliveness on this planet, and to get comfortable with the uncertainty. 

Truly, that’s what all of us as leaders are being asked to learn right now.

Before you move on with your day, take a moment to check in with yourself:

➜  What comes up when you imagine embracing the mess? 

➜ What could it look like to let more creative “mess” into your work and leadership?

If you’d like to support in learning how to partner with nature’s cycles for yourself or your team, reach out to hello@sisterseasons.com and let’s chat! I offer 1:1 support, public programming for women and non-binary changemakers, and workshops and trainings for teams of all genders.

Photo Credit: Erickson Balderama

Disclaimer: This article is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only. None of the information provided should be construed as medical advice. If you have concerns related to your menstrual cycle, please consult a licensed health care provider.