The Stability of Practice

The joy of journalling

Yesterday Tom and I had breakfast at Chanterelles restaurant in Edmonds then drove down to the waterfront and looked out over the Puget Sound and the Olympic mountains while we journalled and shared about our week. This has been an important part of the rhythm of our life for many years but over this summer with the busyness of attending Wild Goose, Creative World Festival, the Celtic retreat and other commitments, we have had to let it slide. As we sat and journalled yesterday a deep peace settled into my soul. I need this I thought. I am incomplete without it.

We hear a lot today about the importance of stability of place. I wish we talked as much about the stability of practice. Regular daily, weekly and yearly practices that restore our bodies, our souls and our spirits are essential for all of us and I don’t think we realize how much the loss of these impacts us. I love to sit each morning in my office looking out towards the mountains while I pray. This morning I notice that the big maple tree I can see is touched with tones of red. Autumn is definitely here. It is also the harvest season, the time to pick and process apples (Tom and I picked 100 lb from our trees on Saturday), to make marinara sauce from the tomatoes, store the winter squash and generally get ready for a season when there is no fresh, local food available.

What are the equivalent practices in my spiritual life I wonder? This summer has been a busy season of ministry, a good season of growth and productivity. How am I now getting ready for the winter blasts? What spiritual food am I storing up for the coming season of dark? Getting back into our weekly rhythm of journalling and check in time is obviously part of that. Going away on one of our quarterly spiritual retreats is another.  Walking around Greenlake with Tom and our dog Bonnie talking, praying and drinking in the beauty of creation is another. These are some of the practices that help me store up the spiritual nutrients I need to see me through the dark season of my life.

This is obviously not the first time that I have blogged about this. The information in this post How Do We Find Stability in a Changing World? is some that I have found particularly valuable over the years. So much of my life has been spent in unstable living situations. Most of these suggestions came from my twelve years on the Mercy Ship Anastasis when my only stable reference point was a moving object in the middle of the sea.

This is a good season to evaluate your spiritual lives as I suggest in this post: Have You Taken A Spiritual Audit Lately? and you might want to evaluate the rhythms that are important to you. What are your equivalents of daily prayer, weekly journalling and quarterly retreats? How do they provide stability for your spirit?