june and july 2021: what I’m learning and loving
I accidentally took the month of July off of writing. Grant and I went to Black Mountain that first week in July, and I had plans to write lots but instead we slept, slept, hiked, ate, and slept some more. Our kids started back to school this week (also might have contributed to the not writing business), so it feels like summer is winding down even if it’s only early August so maybe this could be the “what I’m learning and loving from summer break” edition.
What I’m loving
Qustodio. About a week into summer break, I decided that drastic measures needed to be taken regarding screen time. I was spending too much of my day negotiating with the kids about how much and when and what. Our rule is no screens before lunch, but as soon as lunch was over, the kids would start negotiating with me about how much screen time, and I was so sick of it. I did a few hours of research and decided to try Qustodio. Our kids only have tablets, so you just download the Qustodio app on the adults’ phones and on the devices you want to track. It tracks everything, and you can set time of day limits, time limits, etc., which is my favorite part. If you use the code SUMMER10, you get 10 percent off (and I get a tiny commission too!). Best $50 I’ll spend every year, I think.
Hats and a new sunscreen. I’m at the age where it isn’t cool to get tan anymore. I live with a guy who is in and out of dermatology offices all day, so I hear plenty of skin cancer horror stories. But I don’t love sunscreen, and I have had trouble finding something for my face that doesn’t leak into my eyes and irritate my contacts all day. I found this Cerave sunscreen that seems to stay on my face, doesn’t feel too greasy, and it has a decent score on EWG. I’ve been increasingly wearing hats over the past few years, and I added this one to my repertoire earlier this spring and have been wearing it all summer.
Pickle ball. My parents play pickle ball with the kids all the time, and we finally bought our own set a few weeks ago – and we’ve all been loving it. Grant’s and my rule is that we’re almost always willing to spend money on things that get us moving more and things that get us outside more – pickle ball does both, and we can all play together. We bought this set (it’s smaller than “standard,” but it works for us + as a bonus, it fits the width of the basketball lane we already have drawn on our driveway) and this extra set of paddles. I think it’s the best $100ish we’ve spent in awhile.
Traditions. This summer has been weird. My work has been stressful, our schedules were weird. At the beginning, it felt like maybe we could find some new kind of normal from the pandemic; now it feels like all too much again. But we went to the pool and ordered pizza on a lot of Fridays, we ended summer break with our traditional camping trip to Lake Michigan, we slept in lots and leaned into our summer traditions as much as we could. Living seasonally invites us to create traditions and celebrations based on the season of the year, and even though this summer was weird, those traditions grounded me and will remind of the joy in the midst of the weird and hard of this season.
What I’m learning
How rest depleted we are. As mentioned, Grant and I planned a last minute trip to Black Mountain, NC while the kids were at grandparent’s camp with my parents in early July. It was lovely, as usual. We didn’t have many plans, other than a few hikes and dinner with some college friends. But we slept at least ten hours every night and took naps most days. We realized that, once our normal schedule slowed down a bit, our bodies had the chance to rest as much as we actually needed. Despite reeeeeally scaling back our schedules over the last few years, we still found ourselves completely exhausted once we got away from home and our normal schedules. Some of this, of course, is the pandemic, but some of it is this stage of life we’re in. It was a wake-up call for us of how much rest we actually need (and of different varieties too) and to make sure we’re structuring our lives so that we can be as well-rested as is possible. Because we can’t show up well for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the work we want to do in the world – if we’re exhausted.
The importance of story. Jasper and Maeve got super into Greek mythology last year. We kept this library book so long that I had to pay for it. This – unbeknownst to me at the time – planted a seed in me of reading more mythological stories. Thanks to the direction of Seminary of the Wild, I delved into Courting the Wild Twin, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, If Women Rose Rooted, and Women Who Run with the Wolves, all of which tell mythological stories and their various levels of meaning. As far as we know, perhaps the only thing that sets us apart from other creatures, is the human capacity for storytelling. We are story making creatures, always creating stories even if they’re just in our own minds about what has happened to us or around us. For as long as we have been able to study humans, we’ve been using story to help us make meaning out of the world.
This summer, I’ve almost inadvertently immersed myself in the power of the stories we tell ourselves. So far, none of the stories I’ve encountered are ones that I’ve head before. They’re wilder, more connected with the feminine, more indigenous to their place, and more intuitive than so many of the myths I’ve encountered thus far in my life. It has me curious about the power the stories our culture tells hold over us – and what we’re missing by not embracing more diversity when it comes to the stories we share and passdown.
Think about the Hebrew creation myth in Genesis. First of all, I think that story’s primary teaching is that all of creation (including humans!) were created good (Genesis 1-2), but so much of the teaching I learned in church as a kid focused on the Fall that only comes in the telling of the story in Genesis 3. We humans already have a negativity bias, so of course we’re going to focus on the the whole talking snake and Eve bit. Think about how differently we might view ourselves, one another, and ourselves is we stuck with Genesis 1/original goodness instead of focused so much on Genesis 3 and so-called original sin (something early Christians didn’t embrace formally until the SIXTEENTH century).
Think about the myths and stories we Americans tell about ourselves: how Columbus and the colonizers who followed “discovered” the Americas, the whitewashing we give Thanksgiving, the problematic mythology around Cowboys and Indians and the Wild West, the list goes on. Many of those stories just aren’t true or, at best, are only telling part of the story.
Stories are important and powerful, but my reading over the summer has demonstrated to me how important it is to listen to different sorts of stories, to different kinds of voices, to get curious about what truths about myself and our world I miss when I only listen to the stories sanctioned and sanitized by our culture, religion, or family of origin.
What are YOU learning and loving lately?!
