In Search of a Mood Shift.
More Shareables from The Slow Sip
So first, a celebration and a thank you!
The Slow Sip recently crossed the 500-subscriber mark. Yay!
Thank you, to each and every one of you for pausing your busy lives to read here. And thank you for becoming a Slow Sip subscriber.
Now for a little perspective.
As much as I am elated by this achievement, I can always count on my family to keep me grounded. A few months ago, my husband and I were driving with our grandchildren. I happened to be reading my email (not driving) and I said out loud, “Yay, just got two new subscribers!” My six-year-old granddaughter said from the back seat…
“Wait! Mémé, you have subscribers?”
I thought, “Wait! You know what subscribers are?”
“Yes,” I said, puffing up just a little at the thought that she might think her grandmother is cool.
“How many?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe about 300 hundred.”
She scoffed. “Mémé, that’s NOTHING! Jesus has over a million subscribers on YouTube and HE’S DEAD!”
So okay, that was disturbing on so many levels. I considered getting curious with her about that statement, but I decided to just let it go.
I think we are craving a mood shift.
I recently posted something on Substack’s social media platform, Notes, which, to my surprise, went “Slow Sip Viral.” Slow Sip viral is not really viral. It’s not “Jesus viral.” Slow Sip viral is anything I post that gets above a half dozen likes. Here’s the post.
For someone who has become accustomed to the sound of crickets whenever I post something anywhere, I was a little gob-smacked at the response to this one.
Perhaps it tapped into a longing out there. A longing for peace in a world full of pain.
Unfortunately, we don’t get there by ignoring or shutting out the world we live in. Nor do we find peace by suppressing or ignoring our pain.
I think of our moods and emotions like the emerging and changing colours in a sunset. They are beautiful, not because they arise from sunlight, but because they arise from way the sunlight dances with the dark.
In case you missed it, I explore the inner work of greater peace in my most recent post.
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I’ve been dancing with this paradox lately.
Can I accept the woundedness of the world and allow the pain that it elicits in me and still lean toward hope?
In January, I received a new issue of The Red Hand Files, from musician Nick Cave, in which he wrote about hope. I was interested to read it, as Cave, a man who has had to endure the loss of two sons, has experienced his share of tragedy and despair. In this letter, he introduces the notion that our world often comes to us “packaged” as despair.
Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing.
We achieve this vitality of spirit by rejecting the relentless promotion of despair and opening our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be. We try to view the world not as it is packaged, presented and sold to us but as we imagine it could be. We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope – the necessary driver of change – to inspire us to action.
Shareables from Substack.
Humaning with Dr. Kelly Flanagan
Leaning toward hope does not require us to deny our pain.
As if on cue, as I was writing this, a beautiful essay from author, coach, and clinical psychologist,
, arrived in my inbox. In, Pain Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Path, he says:“Sadness, when allowed to flow unfettered, paves the way for peace. It cleanses you and empties you, freeing all the other energies that were trapped right behind it. This is why trying to feel peaceful never works. Peace is like toilet paper stuck to the heels of sadness—if you want to feel peace, let yourself feel sad, then look down at your shoes.”
I’ve read this essay three times now, and each time I am rewarded with new layers of understanding.
Robin Blackburn McBride – Awakening Wonder
Writer, poet, coach, and fellow Canadian,
, explores the phenomenon of wonder. In her words, Awakening Wonder is “For those who yearn for a glimmer of the vast and mysterious. For what points to something bigger than ourselves, what gives us hope.”In her riveting story, Unseen Hand, she shares her narrow escape from death through a personal experience of “temporal distortion,” the unexplained slowing down of time.
“The brown sedan I’d just cut in front of was a surprise, as was the oncoming pickup. Pedalling the centre line between the trajectories of those two vehicles, on a strip of road about twenty-two inches wide, it happened.
Time slowed down.”
Holly Starley’s Rolling Desk.
Sometimes a mood shift becomes possible when you allow yourself to be transported to another world. It’s that experience that keeps me coming back to
’s beautiful writing from her rolling desk, a beloved red van called Ruby. I fell in love with her stories about her nomadic life with Ruby van Jangles.Her writing transports me to her world – a world where the separation between Holly and the natural world is as thin as Ruby’s red exterior. In her essay, My Living Room Is the World, Holly says:
“A paradox of scale, life in my 60-square-foot living space has brought entire deserts, miles and miles of beach, towering glaciers, roaring rivers, critter-filled forests to my front porch. It’s piped into me birdsong and fox cackles and wild burrow brays. But it’s that thinness—how I feel myself melting into the life and rhythms all around me—that sends a thrill through my veins.”
Cathy, thank you for your mention of my article and for your kind words about it. Grateful to be a part of the good work you're doing here on Substack!
I'm taking time to develop new skills and make repairs during the big storm. I am trying not to be to apocalyptic as that can rob our vision of the future and what it can be. Like Seth Godin says the future is built day by day. Great read! Thanks for the Nick Cave quote.