Many years ago, my aunt gave me a book called "The Art of Doing Nothing." I want to tell you it changed my life — that I read it on a porch with a cup of tea and rediscovered the art of stillness.
I never opened it. It's probably still on a shelf somewhere, doing nothing, which is at least consistent with its title.
We know, in theory, that stillness exists. We just don't get around to it. There's always one more deadline, one more email, one more thing too important to set down. As a queer woman, I've learned to read the news the way you'd check weather before a hike — not out of curiosity, but to know what I'm walking into. Vigilance starts to feel less like a choice and more like a permanent posture.
Two weekends ago, I set some of it down.
I went backpacking with a dear friend — something we used to do every year, until "every year" quietly became "not for a while." It was his first trip back on the trail since a heart attack last year. He's only 47.
So we took it easy. We drove to the Selkirks near Bonners Ferry, Idaho, hiked six miles in and set up camp. The next day we did a short day hike before heading back out on day three.
Old me — busy me, go-go-go me — might have said that didn't count as a real camping trip. Where's the ambition? But with only a few hours on the trail each day, something happened that I was almost afraid of: There was a lot of time left over. Time to just be.
My friend napped. His body was telling him something, and he listened. I didn't nap — that's not quite my instinct yet — but I wandered the campsite, watched the fish jump at sunset, and lay on a rock watching clouds take shape, something I hadn't done since I was a kid with my grandma.
Psalm 46 says it plainly: "Be still, and know that I am God." I used to hear only the first half — be still — like a command to endure before getting back to being productive. But look at what the verse links together. Not "be still, and then get back to it." Be still and know. The stillness isn't the point. It's the doorway.
And the knowing? I am not the one holding everything up. My inbox doesn't know that. The version of me who answers emails at 9 p.m. because it feels urgent doesn't quite believe it, either — not really. Neither does the version of me that's been trained to keep one eye on the news, bracing for what's said about people like me next. Rest can feel like letting my guard down at exactly the wrong moment. But bracing isn't the same as living, and I'm not sure it's ever kept anyone safe in the way it promises to.
I scroll the news before my feet hit the floor some mornings, checking what's been said or done or proposed overnight about people like me, as if staying informed and staying safe were the same thing. There's a particular kind of tired that comes from loving who you love, or being who you are, in a world that keeps putting it to a vote — a body that keeps score even when the mind tries to rest.
Even Jesus had to be told to rest, or rather, he did the telling. In Mark's Gospel, the disciples return from a stretch of ministry, and Jesus doesn't say, "Great, what's next." He says, "Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest a while." Not the next room. Somewhere the crowd can't follow.
I don't think that's an accident. If the disciples were still reachable, they'd still be reached. Someone would have one more good and important reason not to rest yet. Maybe the same is true for those of us who've learned to treat our own rest as a low priority — a thing to earn only once the fight is over. The fight is rarely over. Rest anyway. It might be the most defiant thing available to us.
Even while resting and watching the landscape, some part of me was already filing the fish and the clouds away as pulpit supply material — old habits don't clock out. But somewhere in there, it shifted. I stopped narrating the sunset and just watched it.
I'm the person who overloaded her college schedule to graduate in three years, who worked amusement park food stands from age 14 to pay her way through school. Today I write a column, run a newsroom, teach full time, and somewhere in the cracks, I'm also a new parent. None of that is a complaint.
But I'm learning stillness in smaller places, too — a trailhead isn't required. My son climbing over me on the bedroom floor has taught me more about presence than I expected an infant to teach a grown woman.
Maybe you don't need a heart attack, yours or a friend's, to give yourself permission. Maybe you just need a fish jumping at sunset, or ten unscheduled minutes you don't immediately fill — and the reminder that you're allowed to have them, even now, even with so much still unresolved.
Be still, the Psalm says. Not earn stillness. Just be still — and know.
