Year of Spiritual Thinking--Month 2, Week 3

The pull of what you love

Let yourself be silently drawn

by the stronger pull

of what you really love

—Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, The Illuminated Rumi

Good morning, friends, and welcome to Practicing Terraphilia in a Year of Spiritual Thinking! I began this spiritual-thinking project at Winter Solstice with the aim of searching for the spiritual connection in our terraphilia, humans’ innate affiliation for this living earth and those with whom we share the planet—animal, vegetable and mineral. And with the aim of enriching my own personal spiritual practices in the doing.

I wanted to share this Year of Spiritual Thinking because I have the sense that many of us are searching for a way to express the ineffable, the connection we feel to the wild world, to other species, to the living network of lives we often call nature and to the sacred force of life itself. I figured we could search and learn together. And it’s certainly been rewarding so far.

Also exhausting. As always, I am trying to do too much! I am a learner-by-doing, and a chronic optimist about how much I can sustainably handle in any given time.

Yesterday, as I split kindling from my firewood pile before making dinner, I thought about how many times I’ve written about searching for a sustainable pace in my life, how much I’ve learned along the way, and how I despite it all, I still suck at finding and keeping that pace. I get carried away with enthusiasm for work and life and simply forget I have limits. As we all have limits of differing kinds.

My firewood pile on a sunny day….

The “Pull of What You Really Love”

It helps me to remember Rumi’s words: “Let yourself be silently drawn/by the stronger pull/of what you really love.” Oh yeah! Slow down. Listen within. Ask yourself, is this what I really love and want to do?

Writing these newsletters is part of the work I really love.

I want to be present in this writing, not rush through it before my energy crashes. I want to bring my best, most incisive and thoughtful self to thinking and reading and digesting what I’ve learned. I want to be a terraphilic, loving, engaged voice in each newsletter and the conversations that develop from them. I can’t do that when I’m trying to deliver too much.

To me, Rumi’s words are a powerful reminder to align our lives to what matters most. To give our time and attention to what tugs ceaselessly at us, our true passion and what feeds mind, body, heart and spirit.

Or put a different way, to give ourselves time and space to bring our whole and best selves to the work that we most love.

Adjusting the Schedule

So it’s time to adjust my publishing schedule. When I started Practicing Terraphilia, I was so excited about Substack and connecting with all of you in this direct way that I was way too ambitious about my weekly offerings. After meeting with

Sarah Fay

, the Goddess of All Things Substack, I settled on the current schedule.

Which, I have to confess, is still too ambitious. Perhaps not for you, readers, but for me.

Writing Practicing Terraphilia is not my only work. Just in the next two weeks, I’ll be traveling to Boulder, Colorado, for an annual native-plants-in-landscaping conference (I’m on the planning committee and also the conference MC), plus preparing and teaching a Zoom-workshop (more about that below), being interviewed for a national podcast on christian thought, and planning a speaker series.

And somehow I need to keep the home fires burning (literally, on this snowy day when a fire is crackling in my kiva fireplace). I walk this life solo, so whatever needs to get done in the household sphere is on me. And as I often forget (that optimism thing again!), I need to save energy for my continuing effort to stay healthy within the limits of Lupus erythematosus, a chronic autoimmune condition.

Revised Schedule

With that in mind, here’s my revised newsletter schedule:

Every Wednesday (moving from Tuesday), a Gratitude post with a photo and haiku/haibun, and a short essay on what I’m grateful for that week and what it means to all of us.

Every other Sunday, a longer reflection on practicing our terraphilia and what I’m learning from my Year of Spiritual Thinking project.

Once a month, an extra offering for paid subscribers, perhaps a comment on recent scientific research that relates to practicing terraphilia or spiritual thinking, a short video “nature walk” with me, or a piece of my writing.

Mossy heart, a reminder that life persists and green will return

What I am reading and listening to right now

Here’s a peek at some of the readings/listenings that are inspiring and informing me right now:

The Illuminated Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with illuminations by Michael Green A book to savor, both visually and in spirit.

Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, by John O’Donohue A friend lent me his copy and I am treasuring O’Donohue’s words so much, I clearly need to buy my own copy!

This episode of the Emerging Form podcast in which poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and science writer Christie Aschwanden interview mathematician Paul Hearding, who memorized more than 16,000 digits of Pi (yes, that’s sixteen thousand) by turning the numbers into stories that inhabit a palace in his head. What?! Listen and I bet you’ll be fascinated too. Even if you don’t want to set a record memorizing digits of Pi, the technique he invented for memorizing is something you can adapt for yourself. It’s a great brain exercise.

Another podcast that always inspires and informs me is Priscilla Stuckey’s Earth :: Spirit. Her latest episode about trusting the flow of life is particularly powerful.

Maybe what is happening to me isn’t as bad as it feels right now. Maybe life will flow again into places I’ve barely dreamed of going. Maybe I will look back and see how it all makes sense.

—Priscilla Stuckey, “Trusting the Waters of Life”

“Holy As a Day is Spent” by Carrie Newcomer is on repeat in my playlist for the reminder of the sacred in the everyday.

This week’s poem: “Hope,” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from her book, All the Honey, especially these lines:

Hope’s secret: 
it doesn’t know 
the destination— 
it knows only 
that all roads begin 
with one foot 
in front 
of the other.

---

Workshop on Re-Storying Landscapes Coming Up!

Join me for a Zoom presentation of The Ditch & The Meadow, the story of the block of urban creek and the decaying industrial property my late husband and I “re-storied” in the years we lived in the small town of Salida, Colorado. Here is the link to register.