Year of Spiritual Thinking 4.5 (Month 4, Week 5)

Tending Our Spirits & Rewirement

Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ 
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” 

Before I get into writing about this Year of Spiritual Thinking and what I plan to do with this wild and precious life (thank you, Mary Oliver, for reminding me always to stop and consider before the days slip by unnoticed!), I have news to share: you can catch me on two national podcasts this month!

Podcast News

The first podcast, “Learning How to See” with Brian McLaren of the Center for Action and Contemplation fits right into this Year of Spiritual Thinking Project. We talked about how to see nature through the eyes of a scientist and lover who practices terraphilia. That episode drops today, so I don’t have the specific link, but if you go to the podcast on your favorite streaming service or the Center for Action and Contemplation website, it's Episode 3 of Season 6. Thank you

Brian McLaren

, for the invitation and the insightful conversation.

Last fall, Naila Francis and Sarah Davis interviewed me for their “hug in podcast form,” Breathing Wind. Then last week, when they released a conversation celebrating their 100th (!) episode, I was surprised and delighted to find an excerpt from our fall conversation included in the new one. Congratulations to Sarah and Naila on five years and 100 episodes!

Tending Our Spirits

In this Year of Spiritual Thinking project, I’m reading widely on spirituality, noticing what resonates with me, and looking for the roots of my own beliefs, as well as how I can walk more spiritually in my every days.

I’m a seeker, not an expert. I invite you to explore with me, to think about what nurtures your own spirituality and how it can support you in your everyday life, especially in these turbulent times.

Tending our spiritual health is especially critical now, because the world feels as if it needs all the light and love we can give. There’s the war and famine in Gaza, ditto in Sudan and other places; massive coral bleaching because of record-hot ocean temperatures; insane politics; less civility and more polarization…. I could go on, but I won’t. I don’t want to depress myself and perhaps you.

Centering our lives on the spiritual, the sacred thread that connects us to all other life, is not about withdrawing from the everyday world, or a deterrent to action. Rather, it’s an encouragement to act from our inner selves, from the best we can be, our place of love—or at least kindness and empathy.

It is the force of love that will lead us beyond fragmentation, loneliness, and fear.

—Sharon Salzberg, Finding Your Way, Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living An Authentic Life

An Exercise

I’ve just started doing a simple daily exercise to cultivate my spirituality, specifically to nurture the joyous part, because that strengthens my “force of love” for this world. It doesn’t require much time, but it yields outsize rewards. Every morning, as I am planning my day—reading, writing, any public events, and so on—I ask myself, what I am going to do today to find and cultivate joy?

It may seem antithetical to plan for joy, an emotion associated with spontaneity, but what I am really doing is setting an expectation that I will notice joy when it presents itself. That I will make myself available for the heart-rush of feeling that comes with rejoicing about something or someone, even the smallest of happenings.

Just thinking about making sure I witness and participate in a moment of joy every day primes me to notice and appreciate when I am gifted with joy, like on my sunrise walk this morning. As I was striding along the gravel road just a block from home, my mind on breakfast and my lengthy to-do list, I heard a chuckling noise nearby.

I slowed, and saw a scaled quail—we call them “cottontops” for their white crest—trotting through the grassland just a few yards away. Oh!

A scaled quail, looking back over her shoulder at me as if to say, “Who are you?”

The quail and I exchanged a long look, and then walked on our separate ways. Hours later, I still feel the joy of the momentary encounter that tugged me out of my preoccupation and back into the living world around me.

Give yourself the gift of practicing finding a moment of joy in your day. Make it a deliberate request, whether spoken aloud or silently, written or not. And then take time to remember that moment, tucking it in your heart like a love note from the universe. This is today’s joy, a gift.

The practice will nourish you, and that nourishment will ripple outward to others you touch in your daily life.

How will you find joy to nurture your spirit today? And how will you carry it forward? Hit the comment button below and share if you are so moved.

Rewirement

I was scanning my Substack inbox the other day and came across a post that gave me a new word as I continue thinking about my life as a Forest Dweller : “rewirement.”

Dave Van Manen

(Ranger Dave Writes) used the word in preference to “retirement” in a post about his life post-career.

I am loving having the openness in my days for more of whatever I want to do - walk, read more books, make and listen to music, improve my own sourdough bread-baking skills, hike, become a better birder…

—Dave Van Manen

Rewirement. As one who has spent time physically running cable to re-wire a house and who has also lived with a partner whose brain managed to rewire severed connections after five brain surgeries, the metaphor of re-wiring is very evocative. I know what it feels like.

Rewiring at the seems-impossible-to-untangle stage

Rewiring feels, in fact, like just what I need in this year of working to shift from a life spent striving to do and achieve, to a life devoted more to being and healing.

Rewirement. The word describes what I am attempting to do: forge new pathways in my mind and my habitual way of working and living, change my signaling and my expectations of myself. Create more openness in my days.

It’s not the same as retirement. I’m not retiring: writing and re-storying unloved land and houses are my passion. But I can rewire: find new ways to work that aren’t so driven, so results-focused, so pressured. I can work on my own time, on my own schedule, toward my own aims.

Rewirement. Just as we would thread new wiring through the walls of an old house to replace the faulty and unsafe wires, we can all work toward the metaphor of rewiring our lives: replacing old habits and ways of thinking and being that no longer serve us well.

It seems to me that the whole world needs rewiring: new ways of relating, of living, of communication, of participating in the community of life that is this Earth.

What if we work on rewiring our habits of mind and heart? Imagine how much safer and healthier and more joyous the world can be.

Join me in the work of rewiring mind, heart and spirit, in creating new pathways to live with generosity and kindness for all. To co-create a healthier and more joyous world.

NOTE: This post is coming to you on Friday because I’ll be offline for the next three days, camped on a mesa above Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico. Which means I won’t be able to respond to comments until I return. Many blessings on this weekend of Earth Day!