Nesting and Nurturing
Ostara and the Art of Right Timing
Can you feel it in the air? Those of you reading in the Northern Hemisphere have entered a magical time in the turning of the Wheel - when all the unseen, underground work that has been brewing for the past few turns suddenly bursts into view and becomes visible above ground. I feel the arrival of spring through my body. Everywhere there is new life emerging - daffodils in rows smiling at the sun, chicks hatching, lambs birthing and trees budding. I have been very conscious of the naked outline of winter trees this year - recognising their beauty and the fractal shapes that repeat again and again in nature, from the branching of rivers to the veins within my own body. It has helped me see myself in nature and therefore for nature to see herself in me, a continuous reflection of the natural world of which we are all a part. Now that every twig ends with a bud it makes me wonder what is budding within me at the same time.
How about you? What buds are emerging at the end of your own metaphorical branches and what will be born when they pop into life?
The Balance Point
Ostara marks the day of the Spring Equinox, one of two moments in the Wheel of the Year when day and night are equal - (Equi = equal, nox = night) - the other being Mabon on 21st September when the Wheel turns more fully towards darkness. I’ll be referring to Mabon in this article as the mirror to Ostara. We are now half way through our ChangeMaker journey through the year and are starting to enter into a sequence of mirrors to the stages we have already passed through. It will help us to more deeply embed the cyclic nature of this process if we can observe the resonances of each new stage around the Wheel to the one that lies six months opposite.
In the Northern Hemisphere, Ostara brings a highly anticipated, felt shift - waking to light and finishing work with the sun still up. There aren’t any more hours in the day than in January, but it feels like there is so much more room for living. The Equinox brings balance and this is a theme we will explore more fully this cycle. Not only balance between dark and light, night and day, but also how we act with balance to appropriately nurture our projects into independent existence.
This Equinox arrives at a moment of acute civilisational imbalance: we are four weeks into a war in the Persian Gulf; our global economic and political system lies under unprecedented pressure. And for the first time in my lifetime, mainstream discourse is actually acknowledging that the world needs to change. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke the quiet parts out loud at Davos in January and named what many have known for years but few in power have dared to say - our system was built to favour a few and to actively damage the rest. We are, as a world, at exactly the kind of balance point the Equinox describes - tipping towards authoritarianism and further collapse, or shifting towards something more just and regenerative. What buds will bloom as a consequence of our actions this year?
Introducing the Nest
Six months ago, we gathered around the Cauldron. The Cauldron asked us to slow down, to process, to feel what we hadn’t had time to feel, to let difficult experiences transform through collective heat. Now, at the opposite balance point, we meet its complement.
At Ostara we meet within the Nest. The same curved container but with a different purpose entirely. The Cauldron breaks down and transforms what we have already experienced. But the Nest protects and nurtures what is new, preparing it for its release into the world. The Cauldron is about the integration of what has been. The Nest is about the careful bringing forth of what is becoming.
Careful is the optimum word here. Although spring brings the urge to run full tilt ahead, remember this is still not Beltane - the next turn of the Wheel that lands us in the full flower of fertility and abundance. At Ostara the trees are not yet covered in green. The buds are there - you can see them on every branch - but a week later they are still buds.
Ostara reminds us that no matter how much you might want it, nothing will emerge until it is ready to emerge.
The Nest holds that patience structurally.
The Dutch Tomato
There are industrial farming practices that force the timing of growing things. Anyone who has tasted a Dutch tomato, forced into ripeness under plastic, will recognise that just because something looks ready, doesn’t make it good to eat. It has the shape of readiness without the substance of it.
ChangeMakers do this too. After the long preparation of Imbolc, the arrival of spring can feel like a green light for full-steam-ahead activity - launching everything at once, pushing projects into the world before they have developed the inner resilience to survive there. This is forced emergence. It produces something that looks like action but lacks the roots to sustain it.
Right Timing is not passivity. It is attentive discernment - watching, sensing, waiting for the moment when the thing itself is ready, not when your urgency demands it should be.
‘Not yet’ is not the only discernment at this time. The other invitation here is to discern ‘not this’. Not everything that gestates will survive and some things might have seemed like a good idea in planning, but when the moment arrives to launch, new information may indicate that this idea may not be needed after all. The Nest can be a selective container. Birds don’t try to hatch every egg, only the ones that have a fair chance of making it to adulthood. As a ChangeMaker you get to choose actively where to put your resources and what to focus your attention on. Balance in all things. Just because you put energy into exploring it doesn’t mean that you have to put more into it now. And it may be the perfect project for next year or somewhere else if you don’t decide to dump it completely.
The Attuned Parent
The Nest needs a builder and a nurturer. As ChangeMakers, we are invited to act as parents for the new projects we are birthing. But a specific kind of parent. Not the micro-managing parent who imposes a predetermined shape on what is growing. Not the absent parent who leaves the new thing to fend for itself. The Attuned Parent - one who can respond appropriately and empathetically to the needs they encounter, and adjust their approach accordingly.
What is Attunement? It is the opposite of the way our current systems expect us to work. Currently we are asked to predetermine outcomes in order to get funding, to dictate transformation in order to achieve a specific, industrialised end. Consider our formalised education system, which requires young people to study towards the passing of an exam, rather than learning how to be human in an interconnected world and exploring the passions that genuinely interest them. Attunement instead asks us to observe and respond before deciding anything.
For ChangeMakers this is not a clinical concept but a practical one. To be attuned is to listen with the whole body. Not just to what is said, but by observing behaviours, sensing feelings, reading what is not yet spoken. The whole Wheel of the Year is a practice of cultivating exactly this quality of presence, so that when things emerge, you are capable of meeting them as they actually are rather than as you expect them to be. Each of the previous dark cycles we have explored has been preparing you for this very moment and building towards this:
Mabon - to cultivate the capacity to feel without collapsing
Samhain - to release what needed to die
Yule - to rest and dream without forcing
Imbolc - to prepare without rushing to act
The continuous invitation to attune to yourself has allowed you to attune more cleanly to others. By that I mean you have been building the capacity to be present without bringing your own emotional and psychological baggage into the equation, distorting what you see and hear. We’ll explore this more in the Body Home article next week.
If the Nest is the container you build to protect the new project, your attuned presence is the way you support it to grow into the shape it needs to be. Force it into a different shape by pre-dictating processes and directing outcomes, and it will never be able to fulfil the role it could. In the Human Hive we called this philosophy ‘With, not For’ - a reminder that our role is to create the conditions for transformation, not to dictate the form it takes. We will explore what this means in practice in the coming weeks.
What This Asks of Us Now
At Ostara you are asked to be fully present to the needs of what you are bringing into the world. For each of the five ChangeMaker types it will show up slightly differently.
The Frontline Activist
Driven by urgency and moral clarity, you arrive at Ostara with energy for action after the long dark months - and therein lies the risk. Urgency is your strength and your shadow. When the cause is clear and the injustice is visible, there is a powerful pull to mobilise immediately, to push campaigns and communities into motion before the conditions are truly ready. The Ostara invitation is to pause at the threshold of action and ask: whose needs am I actually responding to - the community I serve, or my own urgency to act? The Attuned Activist is not a slower activist. Yours are the actions that land because you have genuinely listened first, with the whole body, to what is actually needed, rather than what your analysis tells you should be needed.
The Inside Innovator
Working within existing institutions, you have likely spent the dark months quietly developing something new - a proposal, a shift in culture, a different way of working - that has been gestating out of sight. Ostara brings the temptation to surface it. But institutions, like ecosystems, have their own readiness. Introduce a fragile new idea before the institutional ground is ready to receive it and it will be crushed - not out of malice but simply because the soil is not yet warm enough. Your Nest is the careful cultivation of allies, language, and timing before the new thing is exposed to the full institutional climate. Attunement here means reading your organisation’s rhythms as sensitively as you read the natural world’s.
The Purpose-Driven Founder
Of all five archetypes, this cycle is most directly written for you. You have been building through the dark months - laying foundations, finding collaborators, refining the vision. Now spring arrives and everything in you wants to launch. This is the Dutch Tomato moment: the temptation to push the venture into the world before it has developed the inner resilience to survive exposure. The Nest is your essential practice - building the conditions in which the new initiative can strengthen before it faces the full demands of the world. And attunement to the people and communities your venture is designed to serve is not a consultation exercise to be completed before launch. It is an ongoing practice, built into the structure of the work from the very beginning.
The Bridge-Building Connector
Spring is your most natural season - the web of life becoming tangible above ground, new connections possible as everything emerges from the underground. The risk is weaving too fast. Bringing people and initiatives together before either is genuinely ready for the encounter can create networks that look connected but have not developed the relational depth to hold difficulty when it comes. The Attuned Connector senses the readiness of people and communities to be brought into contact - not just the theoretical value of a connection, but whether the moment is right for it to take root. Right Timing for network-weaving is as important as the weaving itself.
The Steady Contributor
You are the archetype most at risk of overlooking your own emergence. Accustomed to supporting others’ projects and causes, you can move through Ostara entirely focused outward - noticing the buds on everyone else’s branches while failing to look at your own. The Wheel’s invitation at this time of year is universal: what has been quietly forming in you through the dark months? Your Nest may be smaller and more personal than a social enterprise or a campaign - a conversation you’ve been meaning to start, a skill you’ve been quietly developing, a contribution you’ve held back from offering. Ostara says: that too deserves an attuned parent. Give it the same care you give to everything else you nurture.
All ChangeMakers need the same thing at Ostara: the discipline of Right Timing and the practice of Attuned Presence - not as a delay to action, but as its precondition.
What’s in Your Nest?
So here we are at this moment of birth. The buds are on the branches. The lambs are in the fields. And something has been gathering in you through the dark months - in the Cauldron, in the composting, in the dreaming, in the preparation - and now it is ready to be born.
What has emerged for you from the dark months that feels ready to enter the world? What needs protecting before it is ready for full exposure? And what kind of presence are you being asked to bring to its nurturing?
Enjoy this unfolding moment. Change is constant - so practise observing the daily transformation of your neighbourhood and allow the sap to rise in you too as you do. If we humans are fractal mirrors of the greater natural world then you too will be going through a process of flowering right now. Watch for the buds that are opening in you.
Over the next few weeks we will explore these themes through our Four Homes. We’ll look at how we attune from the grounding of our Body Home. How we bring balance in Community Home and discernment in our purpose at the Planet Home level. And how Right Timing fits with our ongoing cosmic practice of Seven Generation Thinking. At the end of this stage of the Wheel we will find ourselves at Beltane, ready to enjoy the full flowering of our work and entering the most productive and fertile season in our journey around the sun.