Dearest companions,
As the month draws to a close, we step beyond our ongoing core curriculum to offer a special edition. Dedicated to honoring women across time, March is a month of reemergence in the natural world, and so we conclude it with a seasonal reflection on reclamation, self-witnessing, and self-possession.
There are moments – in history, in nature, and in daily life – when reclamation begins not with noise, but with presence. It begins with the refusal to disappear, or let others narrate your worth – with the courage to remain visible, even in inhospitable conditions.
This is the courage to witness the truth of your experience despite what is expected of you – and to honor that truth by respecting your own voice.
Crocuses and snowdrops
In the natural world, reemergence is observed in the earliest blooms of spring, in flowers such as crocuses and snowdrops, which pierce through soil that has not yet fully thawed.
Neither waits for perfect conditions. Crocuses generate subtle warmth through thermogenesis, melting the snow around them, while snowdrops produce antifreeze proteins that protect their cells from ice.
Both grow from hidden reserves – underground storage structures called corms (crocuses) and bulbs (snowdrops) that hold nutrients and energy through winter dormancy, allowing them to return, year after year.
Just as the human nervous system learns to sense and return to safety, crocuses respond to environmental cues, opening their petals in sunlight and closing them at night. The species Crocus sativus, in particular, yields saffron – one of the world’s most valuable and labor-intensive spices.
With their bowed, bell-shaped blooms, snowdrops seem almost contemplative – as if mourning what was while showing reverence to what has yet to come. They flower when the world is still and cold, holding faith in warmth not yet felt. Within their bulbs lies galantamine, a compound used to slow early cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s.
Blooming early, against the odds, crocuses and snowdrops embody a humble bravery, much like people learning to stand anew, even in uncertainty.
Elizabeth Arden and red lipstick
If crocuses and snowdrops mark a visible return of life after winter, then reclamation may be understood in a similar way: as the earliest bloom of selfhood after a season of compression. One of the most enduring historical expressions of reclamation was red lipstick.
For centuries, red lipstick was seen as a sign of dangerous femininity – not merely an adornment, but a symbol of women who existed outside the boundaries of respectability. In 1912, the Canadian-American businesswoman Elizabeth Arden famously handed out tubes of red lipstick to suffragettes marching past her salon.
During World War II, Arden was approached to create a special shade of red to match the piping of the uniforms of American servicewomen. This shade, “Montezuma Red,” was issued to all women service members in the U.S. military. Arden and her competitor Helena Rubinstein also both released parallel products for civilian women respectively called “Victory Red” and “Regimental Red.” Not only did red lipstick boost morale for servicewomen and civilian women alike, it was also a statement against fascism, because it went against the Axis understanding of beauty: the leader of the Reich and his appointees were vocal about their disapproval of cosmetics, especially red lipstick.
When lipstick became prohibitively expensive in wartime Britain, women stained their lips with beet juice instead. This was not mere improvisation. It was the rediscovery of something women had practiced for centuries across Europe and Asia – in Victorian parlors, Russian villages, and along the trade routes of the East – coloring their lips and cheeks with what the earth provided.
In the context of commercialized cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden helped make red lipstick an act of public reclamation: adornment not as vanity but as agency, femininity not as something passive but as something deliberately chosen and publicly donned, beauty as a language of morale, dignity, and self-witnessing.
The story of red lipstick tells us that sometimes reclamation begins when a woman decides that her body, voice, face, and story belong first and foremost to her.
On womanhood and parenthood
Reclamation begins in small acts: the first flowers rising through snow, the first return to one’s own reflection, the first act of appearing as oneself again.
The work is to remain – or to become – recognizable to oneself through dignified presence and reemergence.
This month’s two special edition meditations explored reclamation through distinct but related pathways – womanhood and early parenthood.
You can revisit them here:
The crux of these meditations was not empowerment, but dignified presence.
The Woman Who Rises situates the individual woman within a lineage of women across time – real, mythological, and literary – who endured, created, resisted, and remained true to themselves despite constraint.
Figures such as Cinderella, Hua Mulan, Belle, Scheherazade, and Vasilisa the Wise are revisited not as ideals, but as mirrors of enduring capacities.
They reveal dignity in the face of cruelty, clarity amidst distortion, and loyalty to one’s truth despite misunderstanding.
Their insight is simple and enduring:
Your worth does not require negotiation.
Your womanhood is not a performance.
Your identity is not granted by another’s validation.
The Sacred Parent turns toward matrescence and related pathways through early parenthood and the reformation of identity amidst transformation.
Parenthood is explored not as something driven by instinct alone, but as something learned through presence, repetition, observation, and small acts of care and adaptation over time. Just as the wolf learns through proximity and attunement, so too does the human.
The meditation affirms that one can be a tender and adaptive parent without disappearing, while acknowledging the doubt, fatigue, and disorientation that often accompany this transition.
Food for Thought
Let us take a moment, not to analyze, not to correct, but simply to notice. I invite you to gently ask yourself:
“Where in my life have I felt the need to become smaller, quieter, or less visible than I truly am?
Where might I be ready to start taking steps – no matter how small or imperfect – to return to myself, to align my inner life with how I allow myself to present?
What might this look like for me?
A word spoken honestly?
A boundary held softly?
A truth no longer edited?”
Reclamation does not always arrive as transformation.
Could it begin, instead, as self-recognition?
Conclusion
If The Woman Who Rises is a meditation on reclaiming identity in the face of external expectation, then The Sacred Parent is a meditation on allowing the self to endure through transformation.
Together, they return us to a single gesture: to remain recognizable to oneself.
Not through performance, but through presence.
Not through perfection, but through a dignified reemergence.
Thank you for your trust, your open hearts and minds, and your willingness to grow in community. May these teachings meet you gently and serve you well.
If this issue resonated with you, feel free to share it with someone who may need a bit of tenderness this season.
In the month ahead, we will gently turn toward compassion, empathy, and the weight of caring – including compassion fatigue.
With warmth, The Editor of Terracotta