The Slow Way: On Being "At Peace and In Place"

Rest is an invisible gift to ourselves that results in invisible growth, invisible peace, invisible relational wholeness.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

There was a moment when Ace was around two, in 2017, when I finally let myself stop trying to be a published writer. I had spent his first two years trying to balance the significant life shift of adding a third child to my home—a child with a multitude of extra needs. Ace’s presence brought the intense addition of doctor’s appointments and in-home therapies, insurance struggles and endless paperwork (if you have a child with disabilities, you know.) In the midst of that massive life-shift, I was deeply anxious: about my child with Down syndrome and his health and development, but also about my older kids, and mostly about what I wasn’t accomplishing. I had finally published a book in 2014 and I had dreams of building a real writing and publishing career. But in those first two years of Ace’s life, my anxiety over what I wasn’t writing and how little time I had to give to my creative work became a constant emotional burden. I needed to be released from what felt like my failure to produce. 

So I officially ended my contract with the first publisher I was with, despite the expectation that I would likely have to give back the advance I had received when I signed a two-book deal in 2013. I announced that I was closing my blog, which had been going strong from 2009 to 2015. And I finally gave myself permission to lean all the way into the details of Ace’s health and developmental needs, his therapy appointments, and his necessary intervention, and all the administrative work that came with those things. 

I decided it was right to focus on parenting and release myself from the anxiety of producing. 

I’m an optimist, and I imagined that somehow in the big, beautiful work of God, my choosing rest over a career that I had come to dread would result in magical opportunities. I had this wild hope that I’d stop trying, and that’s when someone out in the world with a million followers would decide my book was worth using as their new book club choice, and it would change the course of my life. My career would explode exactly because I stopped trying. 

That wasn’t my story. So here’s what time has taught me: Rest is something that nourishes our long-term lives. And rarely, if ever, does rest improve our influence, our finances, or our platforms. 

Rest is an invisible gift to ourselves that results in invisible growth, invisible peace, invisible relational wholeness.

This week I’ve been delighting in Lore Ferguson Wilbert’s new book The Understory. It’s a meditative, flowing reflection on faith, loss, and the vibrant network of the forest floor. Throughout the book she reflects on what the death of a tree offers to the forest, and the ways trees continue giving new life long after their death. We spend a lot of time with Lore in the Adirondacks, where she reflects on what it means to be “at peace and in place,” as Wendell Berry writes, and to be present to the pain and goodness of the world. 

Early in the book, Lore quotes Andy Crouch who once defined flourishing as being “magnificently oneself.” What a phrase. I wish I had been able to explore that specific language in Blessed Are The Rest of Us. But it’s the idea I was coming back to over and over—that wholeness is the work of becoming everything God dreams of for us. Magnificently ourselves. Lore comes to an understanding that her life is “not to gloriously produce or extraordinarily perform but simply to be who and what I am, even if it is hidden to all the world for a time or even forever.” 

That season of slowing down in order to be faithful to my child turned out to be a simple story of not achieving: No one added my book to a famous book club. I didn’t get rediscovered while I hibernated. I simply stopped. Other people started blogs and newsletters. Other people published articles and wrote books. And I took Ace to his early childhood intervention classes, and tried to be present and grateful. In truth, I felt that a dream had died. I also knew I had chosen the right thing, and that maybe, in spite of choosing correctly, my career might never be what it could have been. Lore describes it this way: “What we find when we stop moving and producing and doing—or moving, producing, and doing the things that previously gave us standing or community or connections—is often death.” That death is real, but death—especially death on the forest floor—always nourishes the soil. 

What I love about this book is that it’s a meditation. Lore’s not here for answers, only to remind us where we are (spoiler alert: We are here.) And to invite us to a slow way of being alive: a way that replicates the work of God and the work of the natural world. As she writes: “What old-growth forests provide in terms of carbon and carbon storage, oxygen, and nitrogen cannot be repeated in our lifetime. What they provide when they fall from natural old age and then sink into the earth below for centuries cannot be replicated…It won’t take three or four hundred years to heal these forests deep down beneath the roots; it will take a thousand.”

The work of God is not just slow, it’s remarkable. It’s intricate. It’s miraculous, precisely because it takes so much time. As I wrote last week, we are unlearning the ways of an anxious culture. When I first began this process of unlearning, I hoped it wouldn’t ache to release the anxious ways I had followed all of my life. But it did ache, and it still does. Slowing our work and bodies, and attempting to realign ourselves with the rhythm of the natural world involves real risk. It can hurt. We need mentors for such a task. 

For Lore, the forest is a mentor—its commitment to slow transformation, the ways the ancient trees nourish the seedlings, the quiet hope of an unhurried, sturdy life. We unlearn the ways of an anxious culture not because it results in more energy to give to our work later, more productivity or success. We unlearn for the sake of the ecosystem, for our own invisible joy, for the nourishment of the ones who come after us. 

We refuse to define ourselves by the attention we get in the feedback loop of the internet, where time is quick and influence flames and then sputters. We choose instead to lean into the dream of God, to become magnificently ourselves, and allow all that we are to nourish the place we find ourselves. Right here.

A Slow Practice

I mean it when I tell you to get Lore Ferguson Wilbert’s new book. And then read it! It’s a slow practice in and of itself. 

But in honor of her book, our slow practice this week is to get ourselves to our nearest natural space: your garden, a walking path, a nearby forest or body of water. 

Just around a year ago I shared here about my friend Jennifer Grant’s book of prayer practices for children: Sing, Wrestle, Spin. One of many ways she invites kids to pay attention to the natural world around them is by considering the Native American idea of seeing nature—plants and trees in particular—as beings, not cold inanimate objects. She quotes the brilliant Robin Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, whose book Braiding Sweetgrass invites all of us to recognize that living things deserve our care and respect. One way of offering that respect, Kimmerer says, is using an alternative to the pronoun “it” when we speak of plant life. This distinguishes plants from our human made tools and objects. Kimmerer suggests the pronouns “ki” or “kin” for beings in the natural world. 

To start, find a seat near some plant life—a tree, flowers, growing things. Welcome God’s presence there among you and the living things. Slowly touch each separate plant, praying something like, “I thank you Spirit for this tree, which is kin.” Or, “I see the beauty of this peony, who is ki.” 

Let yourself name as much as you can around you, recognizing that the divine love of God is here among the plants, mentoring you. 

Close with this prayer:

Spirit, may we live at the pace of the natural world, even in the slow ache of it. Teach us to see your nourishment, even the struggle. Amen. 

A Few Things:

• Our Blessed Are The Rest of Us bookclub for paid subscribers will continue for the next four Mondays. It’s not too late to join us if you’re a paid subscriber or you’re thinking about becoming a paid subscriber! Click on this link to learn more.

• Just a reminder that Amazon reviews make a big difference long term for the sales of my new book. Leaving a review is a way you can show your appreciation for my work, a way that means A WHOLE LOT to me. Click here to leave a review!

• Have you tuned in yet to The Slow Way podcast? It’s all the content of this newsletter, with space for our slow practices as you listen. Tune in every Tuesday at Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

• And as always, a reminder that Blessed Are The Rest of Us is available at 40% off the price of other booksellers at Baker Bookhouse. Just use the code SLOWWAY at checkout.