Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Our topic of the day is the season of letting go. And the reason I wanted to talk about this is I've been seeing what Adam and I,

and I watch TV for like half an hour every night.

And I've been seeing the commercials for things on the TV.

And it's the whole, you know, mercantile thing with everybody getting hundreds of thousands

of little objects that they will actually never know what to do with

and they'll become landfill or giving each other huge gifts like cars. And there's a lot of pressure

on individuals, on the system. And the economy really, really needs Christmas to go the way

it's expected to go. But as I'm thinking about it this year, it's really a different sort of Christmas, right?

It's going to be the first COVID Christmas ever.

COVID is worse than it's ever been before in terms of the number of people that it's infecting and killing.

And it's probably not advisable to gather and we're not shopping the way we used to.

And just all the whole, the whole chestnuts roasting on an open fire thing is definitely damp down.

And for some people I think this is going to be hard.

I was reading an article on adjusting to change, which of course

is what my whole life coaching system is all about. But it said that even if somebody goes to a

Thanksgiving dinner and they don't get turkey, they get some other kind of meat, they have to

go through a really intense process of readjustment because they're used to getting turkey for Thanksgiving.

And it's it's a sacred thing. And it gets really, really ironed into the brain that this is

the way it's supposed to go. Well, this year, Thanksgiving wasn't like most Thanksgivings.

And December is not going to be like most December's. It doesn't matter if you're

Christian or Jewish or atheist or whatever. But there's a way to look at it that goes to a deeper

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