Wikipedia describes the author of this week's quotation, Vita Sackville-West as, "an English author and garden designer... a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist." Which sounds like quite a busy life. I wonder whether that was why she wrote, "Rest is one of the most important things in life, but how few find it."
I also wonder whether it was her garden designing which enabled her to find true rest. It must have been a complete change from her normal occupations of writing and reading, occupying a quite different part of her heart and mind.
I also find rest and peace in the natural world. I am just home from a fabulous, but very intensive, Ministerial Fellowship conference about white supremacy and the need to practice anti-racism in our lives and in our congregations. It was a joy to go for a long walk with some friends on the Wednesday afternoon; to enjoy the beautiful Peak District countryside; to simply be, rather than learning and thinking. (Even if we took a wrong turn on the way back from The Barrel and ended up returning to the Nightingale Centre via Foolow!). The views were fabulous and I came back feeling refreshed and reinvigorated.
I believe it is the stimulation we get in our lives that makes the rest so enjoyable. If we sat around doing nothing all day, that would be tedious in the extreme. But if our lives are generally busy, taking time out to truly rest can be so healing for the soul.
How do you find rest?
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