On Becoming Well: Notes from a Slow Summer

On Becoming Well: Notes from a Slow Summer

Every summer asks something different of us, and this one asked for tending. Not the urgent kind, the kind that rushes toward a fix, but the slow and faithful kind, the sort a gardener gives to soil long before anything blooms. So this became a season devoted to it: to the body, the hands, the face, the stillness, the spirit, the poetry, and finally, to peace, which is where every act of tending should lead if it is done rightly.

What follows are not resolutions or a checklist to complete. They are the rhythms that shaped these months, offered here the way a friend might share what has been working, in case it is useful to you too.

The Body

I began most mornings with a walk, no destination in mind, just the simple act of moving through the world before the world asked anything of me. Pilates followed most days too, not for the burn of it but for the way it teaches the body to hold itself with intention, spine long, breath steady, strength built quietly rather than announced. A few times a week I gave myself fifteen minutes in the sauna, heat drawing out what needed to leave, followed always by something cooler, a reminder that the body thrives on contrast, on the rhythm of push and release. Dry brushing became a small ritual of its own, done by hand, slow and circular, a way of waking the skin before the day began. And always, stretching, at the end of it all, the body asking to be met with patience rather than pushed past its edges.

The Hands

Something in me comes alive only through making, and this summer I returned to it again and again. I baked more than I have in years, bread and pastries and small sweet things that filled the kitchen with a warmth no oven alone could account for. I cooked slowly, too, treating dinner as its own quiet ceremony rather than a task to finish. In the garden, my hands went into the soil, pulling weeds, tending what was growing, learning again the patience that anything living requires. And I wrote, every day, not for an audience but because the page has always been where my thoughts become clear to me, where the noise settles into something I can hold. Working with the hands, I have come to believe, is its own form of prayer, the kind that asks nothing of words.

The Face and Skin

I gave my skin the sun this summer, but I gave it wisely, sunscreen faithfully applied, the kind of care that lets you enjoy the light without paying for it later. Skincare has never been an afterthought for me. It is a devotion I return to twice a day, layer upon layer, each step its own small act of attention, the kind of ritual that rewards patience with a face that glows from care rather than concealment. And baths, often, water drawn warm and deep, a space carved out simply to be still inside my own skin. None of this was vanity. It was closer to reverence, a way of saying that the body carrying me through this life deserves the same gentleness I would offer anyone I loved.

The Stillness

I gave myself less of my phone this summer and more of everything else. The news stayed off, its noise traded for quiet, and I found that the world did not need my constant attention to keep turning. Silence became something I sought out during the day rather than avoided, car rides without music, mornings without a podcast filling every gap. In the evenings, I lit candles instead of reaching for overhead light, and the house grew softer for it. Tea replaced the habits that used to fill idle moments, something warm to hold instead of a screen to scroll. I read more, actual books, actual pages turning. And I spent as much time as I could outside, feet on the ground, letting nature do the grounding that nothing indoors ever quite manages. Stillness, I learned, is not empty. It is full of everything we usually talk over.

The Spirit

Underneath every other practice was the one that held them all together. Daily Mass became the anchor of my days, not an obligation squeezed into a schedule but the quiet center everything else was arranged around. Prayer followed me through the ordinary hours, in the car, in the garden, in the moments between tasks when my hands were busy but my heart had room to speak. And Europe, when I went, became its own kind of pilgrimage, not a vacation from my life but a deepening of it, cathedrals and quiet streets teaching me things no itinerary could have promised. This was the healing work beneath the healing work, the part no one sees, the part that makes everything else possible.

The Poetry

I wrote poems when I was very young, long before I understood what I was doing, and reading them now, I am startled by how much truth a child's heart can hold without trying. This summer, that same voice returned, quieter these past years, and it came back like a muse who had simply been waiting for the noise to clear. Lines arrived unbidden, in the car, in the garden, in the space between one task and the next, rhythm surfacing in me the way breath does, unasked and constant. I have come to believe that a heart at rest is the most creative heart there is, not because stillness empties it, but because stillness makes room, and grace, once given room, tends to overflow into something that rhymes.

The Peace

If all of this led anywhere, it led here. Not to a body transformed or a life reorganized, but to a peace that settled in slowly and stayed. A peaceful life, I have come to believe, is not one without effort. It is one where the effort is aimed rightly, toward tending rather than achieving, toward presence rather than proving.

But the peace was never mine to manufacture. Beneath every walk and every quiet morning was grace, the kind that is not earned through discipline or produced through routine, but given, freely, by a God who was tending to me long before I thought to tend to myself. What I called stillness was, more truly, room made for grace to work. What I called rhythm was grace finding a body finally willing to receive it. A peaceful heart is not built the way a habit is built. It is a soul made quiet enough to notice what was there all along, sustaining it.

The peace was never mine to keep. It was grace, and grace is never something we hold onto so much as something that holds us.