This week’s deposit looked nothing like a nap
This summer, I’ve been keeping what I call a Spiritual Savings Account.
Picture a bank account, but instead of money, you’re depositing rest, joy, and energy, currency you can draw on later, when life gets busy or hard, when the well runs low, and you need something to pull from that isn’t willpower.
This summer, the deposits haven’t all looked like stillness. Eighty miles a week on my bike, getting strong through a regular weight training practice, the kind of strength that fortifies me from the inside, so I can meet what’s asked of me. Cold ocean swims with David that make me feel completely, undeniably alive. Hands in the garden, dirt under my nails. A table full of people I love, eating food we picked an hour before.
None of it looks like a nap. My rest practice is still the foundation everything else stands on, and it always will be. But I’m learning this season that rest and deposits don’t always look the same. Yet, all of it counts.
This week, one of my deposits looked like cottage cleaning.
There’s a little cottage in the National Seashore that I tend to — that’s the word I keep coming back to, tend, because of how sacred this exercise feels to me. I said yes to turning it over for the next renters: scrubbing, folding sheets, making beds, coaxing a stuck window open, cleaning ancient window sills that have seen a hundred summers of salt air. I said yes because I love the person who owns this treasured property. But something quieter in me spoke up, too: check this out, there’s something here for you.
What that looked like was a calling to give the people who’d walk through that cottage door — people coming to lay their weary lives down for a week — the chance to actually do it. I wanted the place to feel the way I like a room to feel when I walk into it. Uncluttered. Clean. Tended to. Holding a sense of peace that fills the space the way good light fills a room without you ever noticing where it’s coming from.
Somewhere in the middle of it, hands in soapy water, sheets snapping as I shook them out, I realized I wasn’t doing some burdensome chore. I was depositing energy into my Spiritual Savings Account.
That’s the part I want you to sit with: what makes something a deposit isn’t the shape of the task. It’s the presence you bring to it, and whether it leaves you fuller than it found you. And this is what I’m learning about my Spiritual Savings Account this summer — it isn’t only filled with rest. It’s filled with permission. This summer’s permission was to try something new.
Because in that cottage, I noticed the rooms the way I’ve always noticed rooms: this one wants to exhale, this window wants more light. It’s the same instinct I’ve spent years teaching people to bring to their own bodies — except this time, it was pointed at a house.
Something is stirring in me that doesn’t have a name yet. I didn’t need one in that cottage, and I don’t need one here. But I have a feeling you’ll be hearing more about it.
Maybe that’s the real deposit: slowing down enough to hear something before it asks to be heard. A house. A hunch. A next chapter you haven’t named yet. I’m not in a hurry to know what it wants from me. I’m letting it arrive the way real things tend to in my life — sideways, with sand in my sneakers, no agenda at all.
If you’re holding a small yes this week, the kind that doesn’t look productive, take it. Sweep the floor that isn’t yours. Try the thing you don’t have a name for yet. Let yourself notice what you notice, even if you can’t explain why yet.
Put it in the account. It counts. And so does the version of you who’s willing to try.
With so much love from my corner by the sea,
