I don’t have to entice them with videos and animated avatars. If I am writing in a way that creates meaning and makes people feel something, makes them feel known, they will come on their own. It’s no longer important to take frantic actions three times a day to increase my audience. Outreach on Instagram, even this blog, is sporadic. I willingly decline all the events I am still invited to in New York City. No permissions needed to leave my enclosure. No more sponsored posts, commercials, or fashion shoots. “Accidental Icon” has also passed away, not me Lyn Slater, I am very much alive, but the persona and energy I was as the Icon no longer exists. I’ve been smart about saving enough until I collect Social Security in June. I cease most economic activity save for some long-term social work commitments that will end this year. I am waiting for my editor’s feedback on this first draft as I write this. During this time, I write and turn in a book. I have a new kitchen and I plant an herb garden. During this time I am blessed with a new grandson, I experience Covid. The busy birds remind me of her nervous energy as do the buzzing bees sipping on my herbs and flowers. I feel her when I sit outside looking at the river. Christmas Day will be one year since my mother’s spirit has rejoined the natural world. A grille is a place of separation from the world yet it is also a place where the world is encountered but on ones terms this space has allowed me to deeply reflect. I’ve experienced the world as if I have been on one side of a monastery grille. Rarely, under certain circumstances, one gets permission to leave.įor the past year, I have mourned the death of my mother and, for the most part, cloistered myself in my new/old home. It is a monastic lifestyle, set apart from the world with limited access, that allows others to come in. Separation can be literal as in walls and grilles, and figurative as in prioritizing spiritual life and prayer over economic or outreach activity. Also referred to as enclosed, cloistered orders of nuns are those whose members strictly separate themselves from the affairs of the world. When I was a young girl, I went through a period when I wanted to be a nun not just any kind of nun, but one who was cloistered.
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