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Ora et Labora: How Physical Activity helps my Creative and Spiritual Life.

By Anita Mathias

Ora et Labora: How Physical Activity helps my Creative and Spiritual Life.

File:JR Herbert Laborare.jpg

I recently went off routine into a funk.

This had been my schedule: Wake, pray, and then read scripture, and blog about it, or whatever the Holy Spirit is bugging me about. This took about two and a quarter hours.

After which I did some housework and decluttering for an hour. Then gardened, another hour. Then a walk for over an hour, after which I settled down to literary writing, working on my memoir and a short story, until nightfall–with breaks for meals, and to hang out with Irene and Roy.

However, with this long mid-day break, my memoir and story was getting squeezed.

So I cut the gardening, cut the housework, reduced the walk.

* * *

And my life became hugely less satisfying. Turns out I needed the time tidying my house and getting rid of everything “not beautiful or useful.” I needed the hour in the garden. I needed my long walk.

These were times when I unconsciously process and come to terms with, or find solutions for, my life’s minor frustrations, just as the unconscious mind does when we sleep. These were times when ideas come, and when I pray, and when my vision jells for the next hours, days and weeks. They can even be times of revelation, of hearing and sensing God.

So cut all those blessed times in which I was a human being, and not a human doing; in which I was a body and spirit and emotion-full being, and not just a mind; cut those times to stretch, relax and move—and what happened?

* * *

Well, for a few days, I fell apart. [Read more…]

Filed Under: In which I explore writing and blogging and creativity, In which I get serious about health and diet and fitness and exercise (really) Tagged With: balance, Benedictine Ora et Labora, Creativity, Donald MIller, exercise, Gardening, holley gerth, manual work, Prayer, Spark, writing

In Praise of Manual Work

By Anita Mathias

Roy and I are, and always have been, people who’ve earned our living, such as it is, at our computers.

None the less, whenever I embark on manual work, okay, not heavy duty manual work– just painting, cleaning, re-organizing, gardening–I am charmed by it.

By how manual work literally helps one work off one’s bad moods. Relieves tension.

How it gives you a fresh perspective. Calms and soothes you.

How birdsong calms the nerves and soothes the spirit.

How, at least for me, my thoughts turn to God and to spiritual things when I work in the garden or around the house.

I think manual work is essential to complete, round and ground the personality.

Further reading

Working with your hands: the secret to happiness?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/working-hands-happiness-burkeman

“cog-in-the-wheel office life, where employees see neither daylight, their families, nor the end product of their labours.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/02/dignity-of-manual-labour

Filed Under: Work Tagged With: manual work

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Anita Mathias: About Me

Anita Mathias
Premier Digital Awards 2015 - Finalist - Blogger of the year
Runner Up Christian Media Awards 2014 - Tweeter of the year

Recent Posts

  • On why God Permits our Weaknesses and Frailities to linger, and on the Baptism in the Holy Spirit–and its limits!
  • In Praise of Desert and Wilderness Experiences
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  • Gratitude: A Secret to Happiness
  • The Things Worth Doing Badly
  • A Christmas Reflection, and Letter
  • Even Better than the Alps… Thoughts on Returning Home
  • Peaceful at Pentecost
  • Failing Better: A New Year’s Resolution, of sorts
  • Burn-Out Vanishes When We Rediscover Purpose

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