Looking for What Grounds Us
unique spring lime green
leaves budding and unfurling
delicious to see
I'm a writer. It’s how I connect with myself and slow down enough to listen to the Divine.
Most mornings, I write in my favorite leather-bound journal with refillable notebooks of quality paper. There's nothing terribly interesting in those pages. I do "Morning Pages," as Julia Cameron calls them. I write about what's going on in my head and my life, explore ideas, pray, and connect dots. Mostly, the motion of looping cursive writing and a pen on paper calms me. Even as I write about the past or record dreams for the future, I am present on the couch with the dog beside me and a perfect cup of coffee.
There have been blessed stretches in my life when poetry poured out of me. I would wake up and be unable to wait to get the verses down on paper. Sometimes, coherent sentences and prose just couldn't capture my disbelief or grief in response to news and tragedy. Other times, an interaction with one of my children or a hike could only be expressed with cadence and rhyme.
I long to write more, which is why I've loved writing the seasonal reflections for Advent and Lent this year. The time, space, and shift that kind of writing requires means I must step away from spreadsheets, logistics, and reports. I most often write at home, with my phone on silent, away from guests, work, and even family and friends. It's a prayerful, peaceful, creative time on my own.
As I write this, I’m in a period when I don't have as much time for longhand writing or reflective theological essays. And whatever muse prompts those full-form poems is silent, or maybe brooding.
So I'm experimenting with haikus. I don't know much about haikus beyond the basics: three lines of five syllables / seven syllables / five syllables. But I'm trying each day to get one down. And it feels just right. It's grounding. It's creative. It shifts my focus ever so slightly from despair to hope, from lethargy to vigor, from dull to bright.
Looking for What Grounds Us
I feel like there's a lot of that kind of experimenting these days: folks looking for the practice, the place, or the community that is grounding and life-giving in whatever season they’re going through.
At St. Mary’s Sewanee, we see this kind of searching and meaning-making all the time. At our Centering Prayer retreats, we see people drawn to a particular tradition of Christian practice: being in silence with God and with others.
Many of our events include meals prepared by our kitchen staff. Sometimes, we even have entire events dedicated to enjoying food together. They tend to be popular gatherings. I’ve seen folks, young and old, come from across multiple counties because the literal ground and the harvest are what ground them spiritually.
Our campus also has a labyrinth. Walking through this simple arrangement of concentric rings can be a deeply grounding experience. I’ve met many guests who came to the mountain looking for an outdoor practice of movement and found a community of people looking for precisely the same thing.
How are your practices shifting these days? What practice no longer nurtures you the way it used to? Are you curious to explore something new? What do you know to be true in the deepest parts of you?
In this vulnerable world, St. Mary's Sewanee is committed to expanding the variety of practices available to you and increasing the number of free opportunities for the community. As we plan programming for the years ahead, we're listening to what practices are calling to people in this moment, and creating space for exploration, experimentation, and discovery.
Whether you pick up a pen to try your hand at a haiku or visit us to explore a new spiritual practice, I hope you find ground, peace, and hope to sustain your journey.
TRY THIS: Daily Haiku Practice
Notice one thing today: a color, sound, texture, moment.
Write three lines: 5 syllables / 7 syllables / 5 syllables.
No judgment. No editing. Just noticing.
Reflect: What shifts when you slow down enough to count syllables?
