Moon Cycles + The Matriarchy

Why women were never meant to live by industrial time.

I was sitting across the table from my friend Amy at my favorite Tex-Mex place, the kind where the nachos arrive piled so high you have to carefully excavate them layer by layer to keep everything from sliding onto the table. Ours were loaded with vegetables, beans, cheese, and every good thing you could possibly stack on a plate of tortilla chips. We were deep in one of those conversations that stretches far beyond small talk, the kind where time seems to slow down and the world outside the table fades away.

You know the kind.

The kind of conversation where you can get a little witchy, a little philosophical, and a little weird without either person feeling the need to explain themselves. Where ideas wander through astrology and energy and life philosophy and land somewhere unexpectedly meaningful. Amy and I tend to meet each other in that space fairly easily.

It happened to be a full moon week, and the air itself felt thick with that strange sense of possibility that full moons sometimes carry.

Amy was walking me through everything that was frustrating her about her business. Projects that wouldn’t quite come together. Decisions that felt strangely heavy. A persistent sense that she was working incredibly hard, but somehow nothing felt aligned.

I listened for a while, letting her untangle the knot out loud. Then I asked a question that has saved more conversations in my life than I can count.

“Do you want to vent,” I asked gently, “or do you want the answer?”

She didn’t even hesitate.

“YES,” she said immediately. “Tell me.”

So I did.

“Baby,” I said, “you’re trying to run your life and your business on patriarchal timelines. But you should be living in the matriarchal cycle.”

She blinked, clearly unsure where I was going.

So I kept going.

“Women don’t run on sun cycles,” I told her. “We run on moon cycles. And that’s the biggest reason nothing ever feels like it fits. You’re trying to operate inside the wrong rhythm.”

What followed was one of those conversations that rearranges your thinking in real time. But the truth is, that moment wasn’t where the idea began. It was simply the first time I had said it out loud quite that clearly.

The Calendar Problem

Most of us move through our lives guided by a calendar that assumes something very specific about how humans should function. The structure of modern time expects consistency above all else. Each day should resemble the last. Each week should move forward with steady productivity. The pace should remain constant if we are disciplined enough to maintain it.

Wake up. Work. Push forward. Repeat.

This model makes perfect sense if you are designing systems for factories or machines. Industrial time was built to maximize efficiency and output, and it succeeded spectacularly at that task. But human beings are not machines, and our energy rarely moves in straight lines. Creativity rises and falls. Motivation arrives in waves. Periods of intense productivity are often followed by moments when our bodies quietly insist on rest.

Women, especially, tend to experience these fluctuations quite clearly. Many of us know instinctively that our energy changes throughout the month, yet very few of us were ever given language for why that happens or how to work with it.

Instead, most of us learned to override those rhythms and force ourselves to keep up with a system that was never designed with our cycles in mind.

The Burnout That Forced Me to Listen

The first time I truly began paying attention to cycles was not because I was studying ancient traditions or looking for a new spiritual framework. It happened because my body finally refused to keep running the pace I had been demanding from it.

I had reached the most intense burnout of my life. Not the kind where a long weekend might fix things, but the kind where the nervous system simply shuts the door and refuses to participate any longer. I sank into a depression so deep that for nearly six months my world became incredibly small.

During that time, as I slowly began the process of rebuilding my life, I stumbled across something fascinating. I started reading about menstrual cycles and the idea that women can structure their work and lives around hormonal phases. Different points in the cycle naturally support different types of energy. There are phases that encourage rest and introspection, phases where dreaming and planning come easily, phases that amplify creativity and visibility, and phases that make finishing work and tying loose ends together far more natural.

Reading about this felt both illuminating and deeply frustrating.

Because by the time I discovered these ideas, I was already in menopause.

Why, for the love of all things Pete Wentz, had no one ever taught me this when I was younger?

No one had ever explained hormones in a way that connected to how we live our lives. No one had suggested that the waves of energy women experience throughout the month might actually be something to collaborate with rather than something to ignore.

For decades I had been trying to force myself into a system that never quite fit. And by the time I discovered that there might be another way of thinking about time, my body had already moved beyond that cycle entirely.

The Rhythm in the Sky

As I continued learning about menstrual cycle patterns, something interesting began to reveal itself. The rhythm described in those teachings mirrors another cycle almost perfectly: the phases of the moon.

A lunar cycle moves through four primary phases—new moon, waxing moon, full moon, and waning moon—and those phases correspond remarkably well with the energetic shifts many women experience throughout a menstrual cycle. Anthropologists have long noted the relationship between lunar calendars and human life rhythms. In fact, many of the earliest known timekeeping systems were lunar rather than solar. Ancient agricultural societies tracked planting, harvesting, and communal rituals by watching the moon move through her phases.

Even the word month itself comes from the word moon.

Long before the industrial clock and the modern workweek existed, humans organized their lives around repeating natural cycles: the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the changing seasons of the earth. Time was not experienced as a straight line of endless production. It was understood as a living rhythm that moved through cycles of growth, rest, expression, and renewal.

Somewhere along the way, we replaced those rhythms with systems that prioritize constant productivity instead.

But the cycles themselves never disappeared.

They simply stopped being acknowledged.

The Day Everything Clicked

The moment this idea truly crystallized for me came after I watched a video from my friend Katie, who runs an herbal business focused on women’s hormonal health. She was talking about how she organizes her work around her menstrual cycle and uses an app to track the phases.

Apps are wonderful tools for many people. But my ADHD brain has always preferred the simplicity of paper and pencil.

So instead of downloading anything, I grabbed my calendar and a stack of highlighters and sat down at my desk.

What happened next was two solid hours of hyperfocus.

I began by marking the moon phases. Then I started assigning colors based on their symbolic meanings in witchcraft. Once those pieces were in place, the patterns began revealing themselves almost immediately. The colors corresponded naturally with different kinds of energy. Nutrition began to make sense. Work rhythms started falling into place. I could see where creative projects tended to flourish and where editing and finishing work naturally landed.

Even homemaking and gardening fit neatly into the pattern.

It felt as though someone had flipped on a light switch in my mind. Because the truth was startlingly simple.

I had already been living this way for years. About four years, in fact. I just hadn’t written it down intentionally before.

And in witchcraft, intention is everything.

The Four Seasons of a Month

Once the system was mapped on paper, the rhythm became unmistakable. Each moon phase began to feel like its own season, carrying a distinct kind of energy.

The New Moon holds the quiet stillness of winter. It invites rest, reflection, and nourishing comfort foods that help restore the body and mind.

The Waxing Moon carries the hopeful energy of spring. This is when dreaming and planning come naturally, when ideas begin stretching toward possibility and the seeds of new projects want to be planted.

The Full Moon radiates the vibrant energy of summer. Creativity often reaches its peak here, and projects that require visibility, collaboration, or expression tend to flourish.

The Waning Moon carries the focused energy of autumn, the harvest season. This is the phase when many of us feel a natural surge toward finishing things—editing, organizing, completing projects, and gathering the fruits of our labor.

Each lunar cycle contains all four seasons.

Every month carries its own winter, spring, summer, and autumn. Once you begin to see life through that lens, the question shifts from why can’t I maintain the same energy every day to something much more useful: what season am I in right now?

Learning to Live in Cyclical Time

The more I explored this rhythm, the more I began to see it as something larger than a personal productivity system.

The calendar most of us inherited was built during the industrial era, when time became something to standardize and measure in order to maximize output. That system works beautifully for factories and machines. It was never designed with women’s rhythms in mind.

But for thousands of years before the industrial clock reshaped our relationship to time, human societies lived by cycles instead. Agricultural communities planted and harvested by watching the moon and the seasons. Celebrations and rituals followed the turning of the earth. Time was experienced not as an endless line of productivity but as a living pattern that moved through phases of activity and rest.

Learning to live by cycles again is not simply a lifestyle choice. In many ways, it is one of the first steps toward operating within a matriarchal rhythm again.

The matriarchy is not something that will arrive one day with a banner and a parade. It begins much more quietly than that. It begins when women start organizing their lives around rhythms that actually belong to them.

And so we begin…

The more I talked about this idea—online, in conversation, and inside my membership at Soft Life Society—the more questions people had. Many women immediately recognized the rhythm in their own lives once it was named. Others were curious about how it might apply to things like creativity, work schedules, food, homemaking, gardening, and community building.

So this post marks the beginning of a new series.

Over the coming weeks we’re going to explore what it looks like to live in cyclical time instead of industrial time. We’ll walk through each phase of the moon and talk about how it influences creativity, nourishment, work rhythms, rest, homemaking, gardening, and even the ways we build community with one another.

For women who still menstruate, these rhythms can align beautifully with the cycles already happening inside the body. For women in menopause, the moon offers a gentle external rhythm to follow instead.

Either way, the invitation is the same.

Not to follow rules.

But to notice the rhythm that has always been there.

The moon did not change my life.

What changed my life was realizing that I no longer had to fight my own energy in order to function in the world. I could move with the rhythm instead of against it, and once that realization settled into place, the calendar I had been using for years suddenly felt far less important than the one quietly unfolding in the sky each month.

If you have ever felt like the way we measure time does not quite fit the way your life actually works, you may not be imagining things.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that women struggle to keep up with the calendar.

Perhaps the calendar was never built for us.

And perhaps it is finally time to start living in a different cycle.