How I Found My Rhythm with a Lunar Planner

The Gregorian calendar was my first container.

Twelve months, seven-day weeks, boxes stacked in grids. It carried the logic of business - quarters, targets, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. I tried to bend myself to it, to become someone who thrived in clean lines and linear progress. For a while, I could almost convince myself that it worked. I stayed productive. I met deadlines. I mapped out deliverables and checked off lists.

But the cost was high.

Forest time slipped to the edges of the day, barely noticeable but always missed. Creative time was rationed into scraps between meetings and mealtimes. Even my “seasonal goals” weren’t seasonal at all, just corporate blueprints dressed up in nature-language, disconnected from what the land was actually doing outside my window. Gregorian time measured my output, but it starved my rhythm.

I don't know if you have discovered it yet but there’s a rhythm to motherhood, to homesteading, to creating, to dreaming - and it’s not always easy to hear it over the noise of modern life. I didn’t come to lunar planning through some mystical “aha!” moment. It came quietly, through years of experimenting with everything from printable to-do lists and blotter calendars to biodynamic planting guides and seed-starting charts.

I was looking for a rhythm that matched the way I actually lived, not one I had to force myself into. I wasn’t built for rigid schedules, alarms before dawn, or five-year plans. I needed something softer, something that could hold both wildness and rest, structure and soul. What I needed was a rhythm rooted in nature, something cyclical and changing, something that responded to the light in the sky and the cold in my bones.

Looking back now, the lunar planner I’ve created feels inevitable. But at the time? It felt like I was wandering in the dark with too many notebooks and not enough sleep.

Learning Through Experiment: A Decade of Trial and Error

A Rhythm That Holds All of Me

The solstices and equinoxes had always made sense to me. I could feel them in my bones. The way the light tilted, the way the wind changed, the way the trees responded - those four thresholds gave shape to my year. When I laid the Celtic wheel over my seasons, it shimmered, but some of the cross-quarter days didn’t land right. Samhain often arrived after the frost had already closed the garden. Beltane promised blossoms while my ground was still barely thawed. The Celtic Wheel of the Year just didn't hold up here in Alberta. But the solstices and equinoxes translated. 

The moon, though, was still the deeper pull. Thirteen cycles, twenty-eight days each, whispering across the sky and in my body. And yet, even that rhythm didn’t always match mine. Some months, I bled with the new moon. Other times, I ovulated during the waning. I stopped trying to force a match. It wasn't going to work perfectly with the moon, although I recognized which moon cycle it was on after some time.  I began to listen more deeply and tracked my own patterns.

That’s when the inner compass emerged.

Each phase of my cycle carried its own energy, its own rhythm, its own invitation.

Meeting My Inner Seasons:

Listener – Menstrual, Inner Winter
Bleeding draws me inward. My body asks for quiet, my emotions deepen, my intuition sharpens. This is not a season for outward effort but for listening: to dreams, to whispers in the body, to what has been overlooked. Listener lives here, in the journal pages, in meditation, in the depths that only silence can reveal.

Explorer – Follicular, Inner Spring
When bleeding ends, energy rises. Ideas spark, curiosity stirs, and I find myself sketching mind maps and scattering possibilities. Explorer emerges with that quickening. She doesn’t demand completion, only courage to try, to wander, to knock on new doors and make new recipes.

Storyteller – Ovulation, Inner Summer
At ovulation, I feel the tide of connection crest. My words flow more freely, conversations deepen, I am ready to share what I’ve been holding. Storyteller belongs here. She is the one who takes the fragments of ideas and gives them voice, offering them into the wider web.

Creator – Luteal, Inner Autumn
As ovulation passes, my energy begins to soften, but not collapse. This is when Creator steps in, the one who harvests what Explorer scattered and what Storyteller expressed, weaving it into frameworks with flexible structure. In my body, this is the luteal phase: sometimes restless, sometimes tender, always insisting on discernment.

This inner rhythm wove itself into everything - my work, my writing, my relationships, my energy. I began planning based not on external deadlines, but on where I was in this cycle. And it changed everything again. 

When the 13 Moons Came into View

I followed breadcrumbs: solstices, bleeding cycles, lunar planting calendars, reflections at my kitchen table. Each held a piece of the truth, but it still felt fragmented. I could sense something larger holding it all, but I didn’t have the language yet.

Then, years into this journey, I came across the 13 Moons Teachings.

First through a book (The 13 Original Clan Mothers by Jamie Sams), but later through teachings from the Woodlands Cree.

These teachings speak to each moon as its own time of reflection, relationship, learning, and connection to land, water, and spirit. They are rooted in a rhythm far older than calendars, far deeper than productivity, a rhythm in relationship with the land.

Reading and listening them, something clicked into place. The way the moons were named, the values woven through each cycle, the stories told in the shape of time - it was the clearest articulation of what I had been trying to listen for all along.

I don’t claim this teaching as mine, but I do hold deep respect and gratitude for the generosity of those who continue to share it. These teachings helped me recognize the heartbeat beneath the rhythms I had been following - and the responsibility that comes with remembering.

It is one thing to follow the moon as a scheduling tool. It is another to walk with the moon in right relation, to remember that time itself is ceremonial, that rhythm is relational, and that we are always living in conversation with the land.

Living Between Calendars

Once I understood that lunar time was not just a scheduling tool but a way of being in relationship, I stopped asking the calendar to be perfect. I stopped trying to align my inner rhythm with someone else’s productivity framework. Instead, I let the lunar rhythm become a companion - a way to reflect, to return, to notice.

I still write with the solstices and equinoxes as anchors. I still feel the tug of the inner wheel, the shifting tide of my cycle. I still mark what season I am in, even if my body and the moon don’t always agree. What matters most now is that I am listening.

The Calendar I Needed Didn't Exist - So I Made It

Each day, I glance at the moon. I name her phase in the corner of my notebook. I ask myself not just what needs to be done, but what kind of day is this? Is it a time for beginnings or for endings? For silence or for sharing? For pruning or for planting?

And slowly, this rhythm began to hold all of me, not just the mother or the herbalist or the entrepreneur, but the whole woman, in all her creative, tender, cyclical wildness.

Why I Made a Lunar Planner

The Wildcrafted Year Lunar Planner wasn’t born out of aesthetic ambition. I didn’t need another pretty place to put to-do lists. I needed a tool that could hold the real rhythms of a lived life. A planner rooted in the seasons of the moon and the body. A planner that knows solstice is not a productivity hack. That rest is not a problem to solve.

I wanted a space that honoured:

• The phase of the moon and the phase of your cycle

• Seasonal shifts in energy and work

• Moments of reflection that matter more than meetings

• The cycles that repeat, not the lines that climb

This planner is for the woman who plants seeds with her hands and her heart.
For the creative who blooms unevenly and brightly.
For the rhythm-keeper, the listener, the one who knows the land is always singing something true.

This is not a planner for getting more done. It’s a planner for being more you.

A Rhythm That Belongs to the Land and the Body

There’s a strange kind of courage in refusing urgency. In planting your days inside a rhythm that begins in darkness and grows into light. In tracking not just your progress, but your presence.

That’s what I’ve found in the lunar cycle.
Not a fix. Not a formula.
But a path. A pattern. A rhythm.

If you’ve ever felt out of step with your calendar, if you’ve ever wanted something slower, wilder, kinder - the lunar planner may be for you.

Thirteen moons, to carry you through the year.

One body, to carry your knowing.
One land, to carry your roots.
And a rhythm, finally, that holds it all.