How Do You Re-Fill Your Well?

Summer once was the time when we could slow the pace, pick up a beach read, and remember what roasted marshmallows tasted like.

As any creative, and all spiritual pilgrims, soon discover, we quickly run dry if we don’t have our “summer” time – if we fail to maintain vigilance between our labors and our renewal.

We need time to do nothing – on a regular basis.  Not time to do errands and make lists and reschedule our lives.  Time to just sit and listen deeply.  Time to listen to what life is asking us to hear, beneath the traffic of the daily rounds.

This is especially true when said life is placing heavy demands on us.   When we are juggling career and care-giving.  When the world around us comes to resemble a dangerous circus.

Twenty years ago, I chronicled my conversion from workaholic journalist to a more balanced, spiritually-centered life as a mother and writer.   A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness felt like a manifesto, as I learned to steep in the joys and challenges of a simple, ordinary life.

The book gave rise to many life changes.  I became a spiritual director, learned to meditate, started to write this blog for others searching for a similar depth and balance.

Our 24/7 plugged-in life has made this that much harder to do – and that much more urgently needed, if we are to maintain our mental and emotional health.

How do you refill you well?

Here are my five top ways, when my writing has stalled, my meditation is as pallid as leftover brussels sprouts, and I start fantasizing all the ways that I can credibly cancel plans without bruising feelings…

1. Pull your favorite cookbooks off the shelf.  Better, if you have one, your clippings of old recipes from your mother, your grandmother, your aunts.  Turn off your phone and give yourself an hour to flip through these.  Remember meals you never want to forget.  Cull, tear out pages, choose one cookie recipe and one salad to make this week – recipes you have not made in years, if ever.  Throw a dinner party for your soul.

2. This has three parts. (One): Spend an hour in a museum.  Just visit a single gallery, and absorb the paintings (or textile, or sculpture) in the room.  What draws you?  What genre, aesthetic, do you feel most kindred with?  When you are full of good art energy,  go home and (Two) take a long bath.  Float in the gallery of your mind as your muscles and mind relax.  (Three), dried and dressed (comfortably), take out your colored pencils or crayons, open a pad of paper, and draw an image of yourself revived.  What colors do you choose?  What words come to mind?  What needs does this self want to convey to you, in this liminal space of possibility?  Record all of this before your guilt or restlessness kicks in, and contemplate how you can take yourself by the hand and practice a new level of self-care every day.

3. Go to the beach.   Bring a cup of coffee or a bottle of water.  Nothing more.  Take off your shoes, feel the sand, take a walk – a long walk.  Then come back to your perch and lie down.  Just listen, breathe, watch the dogs and their walkers, the gulls, count backwards to the days when you sat with a book and idled the hours until dinner time.

4. Visit a small indie bookstore. Give yourself an allowance, like you had when you were a kid.  Go to a section you never visit – travel, say.  Or the magazine rack.  Buy two things you’d never, ever, otherwise purchase.  Give yourself an afternoon to dig in with an iced-coffee or an herbal tea.  Take a highlighter and mark up the phrases you especially love.

5. Find an amazing purple (or color of your choice) chair. Commit to an unstructured day in said chair that you will occupy in complete silence.

You have noticed that these are deeply sensual activities.  Filling the well begins with the body.  Renewal enters the soul through our senses.  We need to leave our heads and take up occupancy in the deep present with a physicality that enables us to reconnect with our memories, intuition, and feelings.

In these early days of June, I wish you a well-filling Sabbath.  You deserve it.

Blessings,

Kathleen

(The image, above, was taken in the new addition of the AKG Museum in Buffalo, NY.  I call it “a chair for dreaming”).