Five photos, and I see the thread — grids and squares. Order. Tidy lines. Which is interesting, you know? Because, today I practiced accepting the mess. A rare day without deadlines, every project out the door, milk in the refrigerator, hours stretching ahead with no plan. Facing down four pints of raspberries, we baked. The chickens have learned to fly up and out of their box, and so, now, I really do have chickens in my laundry room. I’ll say it again. I have chickens in my laundry room. I discovered a pile of outgoing mail, cards and letters, that never made it past stamps. Remember my issue with Things That Require Stamps? There is yogurt smeared on the dining room rug. I can’t get the sprinkler system to work. Mess, and grace in the face of it.

Five minutes of quiet. Reaching down into the mental snarl of today’s collected bits and pieces, grazing imagined fingertips across the brain-tangle. Twigs, stones, colorful scraps, an assortment of Interesting Snippets. I gather shiny things throughout the day. Words and ideas with a particular glow. Snagging my attention on their barbs.

The Theology of Rest is something to consider. We glorify busy, productivity is king. But what really happens when we pause, drift, daydream? A lot of good. Two years later, and my hair has mostly stopped falling out. My paid writing is better, my mothering less hypervigilant, my library fines fewer.

“We treat rest like a sin, not like the sanity-elixir and ambrosia of creativity that it is … Rest, instead of being something passive, is actually an act of resistance.”

Tell me. How do you resist? Where do you find rest?