august on earth
Dear friends,
At the end of July we had our Fara Limite summer climbing camp, a full week of living in Campusel (our camping and climbing zone at the far end of our valley, out of cell service which feels like a true luxury these days) and welcoming two groups of kids for three days each. It was an exhausting week, but a good one too, and all of us leaders caught the late-summer camping bug. We couldn’t wait to get back out there without thirty-plus kids to keep track of (as much as we love them).
Every weekend since then, my friends and I have run to these mountains after our weekly work is done, sleeping in hammocks and cooking food over embers, bathing in the cold of the creek and playing music around the heat of the fire. We have climbed trees and swum in the dam, hiked up into the mountains and watched the Perseid meteor shower in the dark of night, and I can’t help but feel this is how we are supposed to live.
Lately I have been feeling a need to put as much space between me and the digital world as possible, to live firmly in the physical space, and maybe it sounds silly but it actually has me feeling so much more connected, so much less anxious, so much more human. I haven’t done anything drastic, but I’ve committed to an intentional awareness of the way I spend my moments. During our camp when I could steal a few free moments, I would go and read from Anam Cara by John O’Donohue, and I was struck by this line:
“Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit.”
It’s the same idea Annie Dillard is trying to get across when she says “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And I think that we can scale this down too: how we spend our moments is how we spend our days. I’m trying to be attentive to my moments, to the things that I’m collecting in the shape of my days.
I’m very fortunate that I live in a place where some of my days can hold blueberry picking and last-minute camping trips and swimming in the forest, but of course there are the normal days too, which matter just as much, if not more. And so I am trying to pay attention to what is filling them. It is so easy for mindless perusing of the digital space to be my default when I have an empty moment, and this is a habit I’m determined to kill. I’m working on it. Instead of scrolling through Pinterest I sit down and sketch. When I get the urge to check Instagram, I open the violin case and practice a fiddle tune. Instead of watching a YouTube video, I read another chapter, I write a poem, I plan another camping trip…I am re-training myself to live in the real world and honestly, why is it so hard for us to stay here? It is easier to live in the world of consumption than in the world of creation, but how much more fulfilling is it here, where our hands and our heads and our hearts can delight in their united struggle towards that which is real and true and beautiful…
This August I feel like I’m planting my feet firmly on earth and I’m opening my eyes to the glory of these late summer days. I’ve always been more of a spring and autumn lover—the summer seemed too harsh and heat-choked—but this month with its morning thunderstorms and its meteor showers and its mountain blueberry fields has got me reconsidering. I like being surprised, I suppose. I like it when I am caught off-guard by everything this earth has to offer, and all the shapes that my days are able to take in it.
Peace, peace, and more peace!
-Xenia
*just got my first few rolls of color film developed…these are some of the photos from an after-work blueberry picking expedition on the mountain Straja :)