Let me try to explain.
These two months have been very difficult. There were three deaths in our circle of acquaintances, all three shocking, two of them violent. As often happens, things at home got suddenly much worse, and we had several crises that needed immediate and careful attention. Cultivation, even.
In the midst of this, I had an albatross around my neck. A deadline that had been looming for YEARS now.
I was at my wits' end. I could not do both things: be a good human being, father, husband and also do the work I needed to do.
After much bucking like a wild horse, I chose (with some help from very wise people, including my business coach) to do the counterintuitive. I stopped working for almost two weeks.
Instead, I read stories to my children. I read long books to myself. I listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams. I read Welsh poetry.
I warmed my heart, in other words.
The strangest thing happened. I suddenly had more energy and ability to do intense work in a short period of time. I translated, in a two week period, an amount of pages that normally would take me two MONTHS to do. And it's not rubbish work, either. It reads well, and needs only small edits.
Today, I heard a story about the race to reach the South Pole that dovetailed with my experience in interesting ways. The team that actually made it did it not by pushing like crazy and forcing their bodies to do incredible feats. They took their time. They traveled slowly. They took care of their bodies, but they also took care of their hearts. And they beat the competing "team" by almost a month.
These past few months I've been talking to you a lot about rootedness in life and what that might mean. I'm still exploring this idea, still wrestling with it. But I think an important part of a rooted life, a life that nourishes and provides the eventual fruit of meaning, is cultivating the heart like you would cultivate a plant.
The rewards for choosing to do this, even you don't have time to, are tremendous.
So today, I'm going to share only things calculated to warm the heart and help those roots of your interior life dig deeper.
1. First off, start off by consoling yourself with fairy tales. I just finished season 2 of my storytelling podcast, and the last episode is one for the heart.
2. Part of the brilliance of fantasy is that it recasts important questions about reality in ways that make you sit up and think. This was made especially obvious in the last Amon Sul podcast episode, which you absolutely must listen to.
3. You might not think that a piece on Dune's director, Dennis Villeneuve, will do much for warming the heart. But you would be wrong. This feature by the wonderful author Helen MacDonald is a wonderful glimpse into the process of someone who creates with his heart, not his head.
4. Don't miss Austin Kleon on why "absence of certainty, awareness of ignorance" is so important for both life and art.
Reader's Nook
We're reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with my book club over at Patreon. I haven't read it in a while, but reading it in the context of Tolkien's introduction to his own translation is really interesting. I won't spoil it now, but you should really give it a read.
Writer's Corner
Those of you who want to dabble in the world of published writing, or even those who have already published something, I recommend you take some time to think about what it is you're actually doing. Because you're not publishing books. You're creating, then licensing, intellectual property.
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