“You wander deeper and deeper into sacramental time”

Back to the mid-week (mid-winter) offering

For those of you who are new to The Holy Labor, welcome! I’m delighted to have you here. Generally I publish twice a week: an original essay on Saturday and a round-up of others’ “holy labor” on Wednesday. Books, essays, poetry, prayers, podcasts, artwork—anything striking I’ve found lately. 

I love hearing what you enjoy from this gathering of good work, and I hope you’ll share with a friend. Always free, thanks to the paid subscribers who make my work possible.

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Snapped this at Mayo Clinic because Marina taught me to notice shadow & light.

My friend (and Mothering Spirit writer)

Marina Gross-Hoy

is offering a free pop-up workshop this Saturday on The Art of Beginnings. Marina has helped me to look at everyday life as art, and I highly recommend her work—especially if you’re on the threshold of anything new. Check out the details here.

Reading has been huge for my healing post-mastectomy. (Expect many book recommendations to come.) Topping the list if you love nature writing and poetic prose: Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of A Year by

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

and Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. Cannot stop thinking about these gorgeous creations.

If you think you don’t like poetry, Clint Smith’s Above Ground is a perfect place to prove yourself wrong. Readable and relatable, on fatherhood and injustice, joy and grief. Delightful to dip into while waiting to pick kids up (yes, this is a category).

My new favorite podcast: Emergence Magazine on ecology, culture, and spirituality. Thanks to their interview with Paul Salopek, a journalist who’s been walking the world for ten years, retracing the steps of the earliest humans, I found this incredible essay he wrote for National Geographic: “You wander deeper and deeper into what might be called sacramental time: an eternal present, where the past and even the future can comfortably coexist.”

A cold laugh from McSweeney’s: A Romance Novelist Desperately Tries to Romanticize Midwestern Winter by Mary Spencer.

I am Toad. Are you Toad?

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