True love, summer sunlight, and coffins woven from willow trees
TSD #005 - tips & insights on making a slow, well-rooted life
Welcome to the slow down, a column featuring tips and insights for making a slow, well-rooted life.
the slow down tip
Localize your love. I was talking to my therapist recently about how love isn’t a fuzzy feeling. Love is the choice we make to actively demonstrate care for ourselves and others. Love is patient, meaning that to love is to slow down and to extend grace. Love is kind, meaning that to love is to speak and act with concern for the other. Love keeps no record of wrongs, meaning that love is dedicated to a healing pathway of forgiveness and release. These are not fuzzy feelings. These are actions, powerful choices, and self-controlled decisions to weave connection and care in a painful world. Localizing our love is about drawing our energy into active care for ourselves, our bodies, our homes, our children, our parents, our friends, our neighborhoods, and more. Localizing our love is often the most difficult work any of us will ever do, and also, by God’s grace, the most rewarding.
nature speaks
The midsummer morning sun has been golden, a deep and nourishing yellow blanketing our little acre with warmth. One of my favorite things about being a human is our ability to really notice these subtle seasonal shifts, like a slightly different shade of sunshine. It’s been too hot outside for me to work at my picnic table, so I moved a desk into the living room. Sitting here, I’m able capture more of that warm morning glow through the window.
Nature speaks: Take a few moments to notice the shade of sunlight around you. What might you compare it to? A lemon? A sunflower? A Black-eyed Susan in full bloom? A jar of honey? Take note and give thanks. The ability to notice is surely one gift of being alive.
quotable
“Prayer is a meeting with the Eternal, in Whom nothing that passes in time is lost in oblivion. God is Personal, not abstract. Love remembers, and love forgives and even forgets. That is why only He can blot out sins—and when sins are ‘loosed in heaven’ it is an event of cosmic dimensions.”
- Sister Magdalen, Conversations with Children
off the shelf
This reading list from Lady Farmer is full of gems that I’ve added to my list. I’m sharing here in case you want to read them too!
worth lingering over
Woodlanders is an online video series that tells the stories of various people who care for the land and for the forests in beautiful, interesting, and diligent ways. Alex and I have watched most of these and the video on Willow Coffins is one we return to often in our conversations.
It’s strange to contemplate one’s own death, even though it’s the one part of being alive that is guaranteed. We will die. All of us. Something about seeing how these coffins are crafted has invited me to think more holistically about what it means to return to the dust from which we came.
in case you missed it
> last week’s the slow down is here.
> permission to do less is here.
> reflections on my journey into the Orthodox Church is here.
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