A Note From the Road

A Small Hello

A short Checkin today, friends, as we are on holiday, chasing after birds in new places! I’m looking forward to sharing what we find with you in the future, but for now, here are some thoughts stirred by driving by wide fields yellowed with canola, birdsong, and a favorite book.

May has been an invitation to spring—the air a cool caress. I wear the days like a second skin but the mornings awaken my soul. Each morning we step out into wonder—every dew-drenched blade of grass a world of its own. I wiggle my toes in lush universes.

We are on holiday this week and I am re-reading Gift from the Sea by Ann Morrow Lindbergh—one of my favorite books to help my mind and heart slow down. In it she struggles with finding a balance between “solitude and communion, between retreat and return.” It’s everyone’s struggle, I suppose, and I found comfort in these words originally published over fifty years ago.

“In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life, as a beginning. I can follow this superficial clue, and see where it leads. Here, in beach living, I can try.”

The world has not changed so much. On the average day, it feels like I’m in constant motion. Even going on holiday holds stressors of its own.

It’s the season of life we are in, and Ann Morrow Lindbergh speaks to this in Gift from the Sea also. We are moving from the “morning of life” to the “afternoon”—that place of natural slowing that creates in us a sense of anxiety and awareness of the dwindling nature of time.

But what if we looked upon middle age, the author asks, not as a time of decline, but as a time of “second flowering, second growth”? When I hold on to the seed of eternity planted in my heart, I can almost feel it burst forth through the dark soil of this life, breaking free from the bindings this world places on my growth.

I have to make room for contemplation to hold on to that truth; that I was made for more. Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s island-precepts are helping me to make that kind of space on a daily basis:

“Simplicity of living, as much as possible, to retain a true awareness of life. Work without pressure. Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing. Closeness to nature to strengthen understanding and faith in the intermittency of life: life of the spirit, creative life and the life of human relationships. A few shells.”

A morning in May. New worlds open up before me. Life begins anew with each breath.