September: The Season that Bleeds

September is not a month that arrives so much as it folds into being. A thinning of heat. A shiver at the wrist. The golden things going dull around the edges—zucchini skin, sunflower petals, the light on your kitchen floor. I feel it in my body too. The way my energy curls inward. The luteal softening. The blood getting ready to return.

The menstrual cycle and the turning of the seasons are not separate things. They speak in the

same tongue—of ripening and release, surge and stillness.

In the luteal phase, which comes after ovulation and before menstruation, the body prepares for either implantation or shedding. Progesterone rises, thickening the uterine lining into something lush, hopeful, dense with possibility. It is a quiet labor, and it changes everything: the body temperature climbs; sleep patterns shift; the cervix firms and lowers.

In some, this phase sharpens the senses, lowers the threshold for tears. In others, it brings dreams, migraines, hunger, solitude. It is not unlike the world in September. Still full, still warm, but already beginning to let go.

There is a cultural preference for the follicular body: springy, pre-ovulatory, estrogen-bright. We are praised when we are fertile, flirty, forward-moving. But the luteal and menstrual phases—like autumn—demand slowness. They teach compost and constraint.

To bleed, in the natural world, is to prepare for rest. In the body, it is the collapse of one possibility to make space for another.

I tell my patients: the cycle is not a loop, it’s a spiral. Each month is not a return, but a deepening. The same hormones rise and fall, yes—but we meet them in a new body, in a new season, changed by what has come before.

September comes, not just as a turn in the calendar, but as a reckoning. A reminder that what is shedding is not failing. That what is ending is, in its own way, fertile. That a body—your body—can be both ripening and releasing at once.