Curious Reads: Human Scale

Why I'm taking a Summer Sabbatical

Hello friend, Liz here.

#1 Today’s “top of the fold” story is not actually a story but an announcement: I am taking a summer sabbatical from the newsletter.

You will still get a few emails from me—I actually have two phenomenal conversations I’ll be publishing, one with

Trey Ferguson

about the theologians the White American Evangelical church has ignored and then another with

Marcie Alvis Walker

about motherhood and the burdens black women carry, based on her newly released memoir. *starry eyes*

But those will likely be the exception because I have discovered in the past few years that I need moments of no production in order to regenerate my creativity.

And these seasons of rest often lead to my most generative times as a writer.

I’m scheming to get my hands on the vintage reprinted Humanscale Manual for designers.

For me, summer is the time when the kids go to camp and my garden blossoms and my sunburn turns to tan and the rec center pool glitters in our imaginations. I mean, I spend hours outside. I tromp through woods and parks nearby, sweating and swatting away mosquitoes, revelling in wildflowers and birdsong. I barbecue, I weed, I lounge in a pool chair.

For me, summer is the time to be outside. And aside from the pleasure of sunshine and heat, the outside helps me remember my smallness and fragility amid an astonishing and wide landscape here in the West.

Maybe that sounds a tad melancholic, but I find it easy to forget the scale of my own human body. Staring into devices all day divorces me from my skin. I have noticed, too, a particular tendency in myself to believe that my words are ESSENTIAL and NECESSARY and IMPORTANT.

Obviously, I do try to write important, necessary and essential words. But what does it do to a person to believe the world cannot spin without her speech?

For me, it means that I bind my words and my value together too tightly. And it means recognizing my own vulnerability to pride.

Over and over in the world of Christian celebrity, we have watched towers topple. Often, this happens as a natural consequence of narcissism, a sense of self-importance that leads a celebrity to demean those beneath him or her so as to aggrandize him or herself.

I am by no means deluded enough to see myself as any sort of celebrity (Bahahaha!!). Yet whether my words reach small or large audiences, I want to order my life in such a way that I am routinely humbled.

Part of that routine involves regularly stepping backwards, removing my voice from the conversation, and allowing the silence of God to teach me.

That’s why, for a few summers now, I have retreated from online spaces in order to walk, to pray, to garden, to read and, hopefully, to write.

I have one book down already—PRAISE GOD—and ideas for three more (okay, maybe five more?).

The process of writing is human-scaled, meaning, I write books one at a time, one word at a time. There is no rushing through book-writing. And I find I’m particularly slow about it, usually writing THOUSANDS of words before I discover the actual shape of a book I want to write. Sigh.

To allow myself the space to do it wrong before doing it right is a great luxury and a necessity. There are no shortcuts to that kind of creativity. And that space must be nurtured and protected.

The Humanscale Manual

So, this is goodbye for the next couple months, a HAGS scrawled on the white space of your yearbook. ;-)

But as I go, I want to say thank you. Having regular rhythms of leaving is a great privilege, and it only happens because this community offers me the assurance that when I return in the fall, you will still be here.

That’s not necessarily true on social media—Instagram, for example, rewards constant posting and punishes vacation time—nor on other writing outlets. Yet each autumn when I return, there you are, still reading and liking and commenting.

Thanks for offering me this freedom. I hope you extend yourself the same freedom during this new season. You and I deserve it. :-)

Thanks for reading.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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Discuss:

How do your routines and priorities change in the summer months? What practices do you take up and what do you put down?

More Curious Reads

Illustration by Johanna Walderdorff for the New Yorker

#2 What if the art you love most was made by a monster? Can you love the art and hate the artist? A new book examines exactly this question. —The New Yorker

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Photo by SergeyDV

#3 We can grow rice on Mars now. (One giant leap for grain-kind!) —Modern Farmer

Bowen Yang as “The iceberg that sank the Titanic”

#4 I am missing SNL, so I’m celebrating my favorite cast member: Bowen Yang.—Rolling Stone

Illustration by Lincoln Agnew for Politico

#5 Dave Ramsey is in hot water. Again. —Religion News Service

(Psst, I also enjoyed this podcast episode from Untangled Faith that breaks down the Dave Ramsey drama.)

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Just for Fun…

Instead of emptying your savings account to buy Apple’s new VR headset (groan), why not try DIY hallucination first? —Austin Kleon

Infographic by Javier Zarracina for the Boston Globe

”Begin by turning the radio to a station playing static. Then lie down on the couch and tape a pair of halved ping-pong balls over your eyes. Within minutes, you should begin to experience a bizarre set of sensory distortions. Some people see horses prancing in the clouds, or hear the voice of a dead relative. It turns out that the mind is addicted to sensation, so that when there’s little to sense — that’s the purpose of the ping-pong balls and static — your brain ends up inventing its own.”