It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re embracing stillness in life, but if it’s always stillness in front of a screen, it doesn’t really count. In the spirit of Lent (and the weekly theme from @astillsmallpoint ) I’ve been trying to embrace the more refreshing type of stillness by devoting more time to screen-less activities, such as trying to give more care to the living things I share a home with: replanting and propagating house plants, and spending more time with my pet bunny. I think they appreciate the extra attention.
My priest said in his sermon last Sunday that we would all benefit more if we focused on fasting from screens and guarding our hearts as much as we worry about fasting from various foods. He makes a valid point…food isn’t necessarily the biggest distraction from our spiritual lives for most of us in this age. I’m still pretty bad at picking up a real bible or prayer book instead of the ease of an app on my phone, but I’d like to try harder to separate those kind of soulful, important activities from the glow of a screen.
I’m thinking I might try an occasional “instagram blog” like this instead of always just linking away to an article on my blog. I know some people never really read blogs anymore, and prefer a long instagram caption, or maybe don’t even read the long captions, but I’m going to try this here and there anyway. I’ll still post this “mini blog” on my actual blog if you prefer to read it here, it will just originate as an instagram caption instead of the other way around. 🙂 Also, @elsielarson just released a new filter pack for #acolorstory and Moon Stone might be my favorite filter of all time.
(P.S. I haven’t used categories or tags on my blog at all yet…I sort of decided at the beginning to delay until I had posted for a while so that I could see what kind of categorizations would actually be useful and not overly specific, and then apply them retroactively. I think it’s about time I come up with those and get a bit more organized around here…)