Elrena Evans
“I
t was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside,” Maud Hart Lovelace writes in Betsy-Tacy and Tib. I am swept up in the beauty of the month of June… and at the same time, I am afraid. Reading the news lately I don’t know whether to feel hope or despair, and so my heart swings, wildly, from the one to the other. In these ongoing, turbulent times, perhaps we gain even more comfort from our small rituals and routines. Our morning cups of coffee (or tea, if you’re like me). The small “clink” of keys sliding on to their hook, announcing like a quiet chime, I’m home. Goodnight rituals with hugs and kisses; my newly-10-year-old daughter calling out, every night, “I love you, Mommy! I love you more than fudge covered Oreos!”
Ed Cyzewski writes of ritual and routine for us this month, about identifying those things that are the most important in our lives, and creating a protected “Flowers appear on space for them the earth; the season to flourish. Christie tells of singing has come, of abundant the cooing of doves is life in her heard in our land.” garden, even when that - Song of Songs 2:12 abundance is not what she planted. And Anna takes us on a hike through some hard truths about the natural cycle of life, and what God can show us there.
I’m so grateful for the time you choose to spend with us here in Paper&String, dear readers. Our little team is so aware of all the many demands that call on us and compete for our attention, and it is both honoring and humbling that you choose to spend some of your precious time with us. We hope you truly enjoy all the treasures we’ve packed in these pages for you this month. Wishing you a June scented with roses, and sunshine like powdered gold.
How I Find Renewal in Daily Rituals by Ed Cyzewski
I
begin each day with a gentle chime from my singing bowl and a flickering candle.
Well, that’s not quite true. I actually begin my day with coffee, but the coffee technically isn’t necessary for my morning ritual. It does make things go a lot smoother, though, if it’s in the mix!
With my chime and my candle in place, I settle down into a chair and check the clock so I know when to end my practice of silent prayer in about 20 or 30 minutes. That’s when the real work begins—the work to do nothing.
Doing nothing often feels much harder than doing something. This was true for monks who lived in dry, dreary caves, and it’s especially true for us today with our stacks of digital devices on hand. We never have to be alone with our thoughts, and that challenge is never more evident than when I try to do absolutely nothing other than sit in silence before God. Silent prayer has been a lifeline for me after decades of anxious, try-harder religion. Yet, participating in silent prayer has also driven home how deficient most of us are in the ability to simply do nothing. Training myself to be silent called for more intention and practice than I would have guessed. I started with a timed five minute session, and supplemented it with headphone-free runs on clear mornings.
The thing about doing nothing is that it’s really easy to start doing something. Or to start thinking about anything at all. Just sitting in a quiet, receptive state feels unnatural. Even after years of reading, direction, and practice, I found that sitting for silent prayer required stronger boundaries and more official rituals. As I integrated these practices into silent prayer, I saw the same approach prove helpful in other restorative practices in my life. Ritual or Routine
That’s when the real work begins—the work to do nothing.
I’m not trying to sound like a new age/ mystical guru when I describe the “rituals” of my life. You could just as easily call them routines. When discussing my thought process with my spiritual director, I said something along the lines of this: “I need to make these important practices more official.”
A starting time and an ending time makes anything we do a little more official, a little more important, and hopefully a touch more focused. You could say the same for putting something on a calendar, even if the thing you put on the calendar is a walk or a nap. There’s intention and planning in the act of setting up boundaries around something that indicates how much you value it. I tap my little chime and light a candle to remind myself that I’m practicing silent prayer and letting go of any thoughts for the next 20-30
minutes in order to be receptive to God. I can return to those thoughts when I tap the chime at the end. The chime or the candle isn’t magic. I don’t think they help me pray or remain silent any better. They simply help me think about silent prayer as a block of time to treasure in my day. Other activities aren’t allowed to spill over into it. And I avoid tapping out earlier than 20 minutes because sometimes it takes a good 15 minutes to settle down in the first place! Who wouldn’t feel the temptation to quit a little early, to even switch to one of the spiritual classics on my shelf, or to just journal about what’s coming to mind? I sure do. That’s why I use the chime and candle to remind me of what I’m supposed to be doing in that moment. At the end of silent prayer, I’m free to write in my journal. I can assure you that I often return to any thoughts that tried to invade my prayer time. If I can help it, I always pair journaling with prayer.
We certainly need to honor what’s on our minds and to also give space for God’s voice. Too often God’s voice is drowned out by what’s on our minds. Journaling too much can risk self-absorption and circular introspection, yet without the self-awareness that comes through a practice like journaling, silent prayer can be awfully difficult. Attentiveness with Rituals I consider my silent prayer and journaling as part of a larger puzzle of awareness that aims to be fully present in the moment, rather than living in a reactive state that can lack clarity in the present and misconstrue the past or future. Martin Laird writes in An Ocean of Light about the ways that a reactive mind responds to the events of life as perceived threats, much like someone who is trapped in a phone booth with a bee. I’ll give Laird a pass for using an illustration that relies on a rapidly vanishing bit of technology (at least it wasn’t a Police Call Box). Yet, he correctly diagnoses our interior reactiveness in our time of
breaking news and urgent problems that makes it increasingly hard to be fully present for one another, for spirituality, for art, and for just about anything that would add meaning, love, and beauty in our world. Consider the nature of a ritual that is carefully planned out. The practice, whatever it is, has the time, space, and materials required to be attempted properly. There is a beginning and an end, and the participant has a fulfilling sense of accomplishing something. Now consider a reactive moment. You may hear a news report, read something on social media, see something you envy… or pursue whatever feels good and comforting in the moment. Often our reactiveness is rooted in good things, such as a desire to connect with others, to be creative, to be safe, or to simply feel good.
But reactiveness and a lack of intention can prevent us from seeing what is right in front of us, what is inside of us, and what we stand to gain or to lose based on what we do next. By reacting without awareness, we run the risk of even making things worse. The elephant in the room here is social media. The entire business model of social media relies on our natural reactiveness. Mountains of research have proven time and time again that the most divisive and upsetting content is the most “engaging” on social media, and spending more than 30 minutes per day on social media leads to poorer mental health for users. Creating rituals of intention, attentiveness, and awareness is part of a movement toward human flourishing that links together spirituality, creativity, mental health, physical health, and relationships. For me, these rituals often start as experiments. Failure or imperfection are par
for the course. Failing to make any space for meaningful practices that grow my awareness would be catastrophic for me, and I suspect that many feel the same way.
Creating rituals of intention, attentiveness, and awareness is part of a movement toward human flourishing that links together spirituality, creativity, mental health, physical health, and relationships.
What Rituals Could Look Like
Prayer and journaling (and coffee) are essential starting points for my day, but daily exercise got me started on the practice of making daily routines or practices. Throughout my 20’s I had on again/ off again exercise routines, but bouts with anxiety and my family’s health history motivated me to figure out a way to make it work long term.
At first I had to use the “exercise tax” by joining the cheapest gym I could find (I’m a writer after all!) and convincing myself that exercising more often ensured more value for my money. That helped to a point, but I needed a better ritual to make it stick. Pulling from the habit research of B.J. Fogg, I leave myself an exercise prompt each morning with my clothes out on a table and my shoes by the door. The clothes look out of place on the table, and they’re easy to spot after I’m done praying. Each evening I set everything up, and then I know that I can exercise after prayer. It’s not much, but making it a little easier and obvious to put on my workout clothes helps me get moving. By the same token, I rely on some simple prompts to ensure that I make space for art projects each weekend.
I have an art shelf in my office that helps me convert my writing desk into an art desk on Saturday afternoon. I aim for at least one session each weekend to really dive into an oil pastel project, and by having a pad to lay on my desk, a passable oil pastel set, and some pastel paper set up for the weekend, I’m more likely to sit down and work through a tutorial or a photographed subject. Rituals don’t strike me as one size fits all, especially when you’re talking about art or exercise. The best ritual is the one you can do and that brings you some benefits. An open, experimental mindset that allows you room to try new things, to fail, and to adapt and change to what works best will serve you well over time.
I have tweaked my rituals to match my schedule and my needs in different seasons of life. There’s no doubt that each person requires different amounts of structure, scheduling, or prompts for different life-giving practices.
There is a single thread that I find running through these practices, rituals, and routines. We should always identify what is most important and life-giving for us and then never leave it up to chance. The more seriously we take our soulrestoring practices, the more likely we are to practice them and to enjoy their benefits.
Ed Cyzewski is the author of Reconnect: Spiritual Restoration from Digital Distraction and Flee, Be Silent, Pray: Ancient Prayers for Anxious Christians. If you enjoyed this reflection, you can sign up for more at www.edcyzewski.com.
Learning to Love Vegetables by Tonya Salomons
M
y grandmother had this very large dining room table. Perhaps it wouldn’t be considered large to my grown-up eyes now, but as a little girl to me it appeared endless, especially when the leaf was added for gatherings with the extended family. If I close my eyes I can see both of my grandparents at each end of the table, and the rest of us spread out along the sides. Grandma was an incredible cook, and the table seemed to groan under the weight of all of her hard work. While I would gleefully consume most of what she made in her kitchen, there were a few things that I could not stand.
My disdain of anything made with cooked broccoli is legendary in my family. I can recall asking for more milk at dinner so I had something with which to wash down each bite. I’ve been told that I would throw fits at the table for refusing to eat my broccoli... or most other vegetables. Quite by accident I found a solution, at least when we were at Grandma’s house. I discovered a little shelf, created by the joint where the table-legs and table-top met. Once dinner started and the conversation would get going, hardly anyone was paying attention to one little girl. When no one was looking, I would sneak the broccoli or anything else I didn’t like off my plate and tuck it under the table right up in that perfectly sneaky, out-of-the-way spot. Phew. Out of sight but not, unfortunately out of smell. I don’t recall how my grandmother came to find my
stash of old vegetables, but needless to say any subsequent plans to hide unwanted veggies were foiled. Of course, as with most things, age and experience bring us to a place where we give up our childish dislikes and picky preferences. It just took me a little longer to get there. I have managed to go my entire adult life happily refusing to eat—or picking out—cooked broccoli. It didn’t matter how it was prepared: barely steamed, or baked in a rich cream sauce, hidden in soup or smothered in cheese, I found every tiny floret and set it aside. Until recently.
One day, a friend told me that if I hadn’t yet tried roasted broccoli, I should—and she convinced me that roasted with some olive oil and salt, broccoli tasted nothing like the broccoli of my childhood. I trusted my friend, and as it turns out, she was right! Roasted broccoli is delicious in a “what have I been missing” sort of way. The high heat of roasting the broccoli caramelizes the natural sugars, and if you drizzle a little balsamic vinegar on the florets towards the end of the cook-time, you’ll be blown away by the explosion of flavour. A whole new world opened up for me and I began re-exploring my favourite cookbooks in search of recipes I passed over because they contained the dreaded broccoli. I found the inspiration for this month’s recipe in the forgotten pages of one of those cookbooks.
I hope you enjoy this Roasted Broccoli Pesto. It’s full to bursting with flavour and can be tossed with hot pasta or used as a dip for your veggie platters. I even love smearing it over some crackers or a slice of warmed baguette! However you want to serve it, I’m sure it will be hit—even with the pickiest of eaters.
Download the recipe as a letter-size page or a recipe card, just click on the images below!
with CHRISTIE PURIFOY
M
y daughter has a coin bank in the shape of a unicorn. We recently discovered that a silver dollar can slide into the coin slot but cannot be retrieved from the hole at the bottom. It was a tearful discovery. Fortunately my husband was able to ease the silver coin back through the slot, and the ceramic unicorn lived to see another day. As I began to type this anecdote, I almost wrote that my daughter has a piggy bank in the shape of a unicorn—but it suddenly seemed so
strange that we call coin-collecting banks pigs. The writing of this essay has thus been delayed by half an hour’s internet search into the origin of the “piggy bank.” Perhaps I will regale you with what I discovered in conversation one day (here’s a hint: it involves a common orange clay called pygg!), but this essay is about soil. Because soil is a seed bank. Like my daughter’s unicorn, the ground beneath our feet is a locked vault. Soil can hold seeds for years, waiting on the right conditions for those seeds to grow. When winter brings unprecedented rain to California, for example, the result can be a springtime super bloom event, when wildflowers spread across the hills in rainbow-colored rivers.
Soil that is “disturbed,” to use the proper gardener’s term, will quickly give up its treasure in the form of wildflowers and weeds. When I disturb my soil with a spade, am I cultivating glory? Or am I cultivating more work for myself? Sometimes it is difficult to tell. But the word “bank” is the right one, I’m sure. It is only my perspective that needs adjusting. A weed may look like a blemish on my perfect garden picture, but it feeds the insects that feed the birds that fill my ears with song every morning just before dawn.
The climate in my own garden is very different from arid California, and seeds almost always have what they require to germinate. I once heard a local farmer mention the “intense weed pressure” of our sunny, high-rainfall area. What he meant is that our Pennsylvania seed bank opens at the slightest inclination. Did I scratch the ground with my trowel? The seed bank opens. Did the outdoor faucet drip in just that spot? Seed bank! Did the little boy who lives next door dig a trap in my flowerbed for his stuffed tiger? The seed bank springs its lock, and the ground will not stay bare for long. The ground beneath my feet is dense with treasure. There are no diamonds. No nuggets of gold. Certainly no coins buried by a pirate. But there is abundant life. When it emerges in the form of a dandelion, will I recognize it for what it is?
Your full subscription to the June issue of Paper&String also includes: • Directions for a weekend art project from Ed Cyzewski •A review of Katherine James’s A Prayer for Orion: A Son's Addiction and a Mother's Love, by Lisa-Jo Baker • A meditation on hard truths and God’s presence in the natural cycle of life, by Anna Grist • A reflection on storms as a spiritual practice, by Jonna Fantz • A benediction for beginnings and endings from Elrena Evans • Plus a downloadable spiritual practice packet, a playlist of songs of hope, recipe cards, full-color printables, and more! Subscribe to Paper&String!
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