I’ve been calling this summer season my 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, wind doing most of the talking. Getting strong through a regular weight training practice, the kind of strength that fortifies you from the inside, so you can meet what’s asked of you. Cold ocean swims with David, that shock of cold water that makes you 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. Yet my rest practice is still a huge part of the puzzle, and it always will be. It’s the foundation everything else stands on. But I’m learning this season that rest and deposits don’t always look the same. All of it counts.
This week, one deposit looked like house 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 I also said yes because something quieter in me spoke up, an inner knowing that said, 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. And most of all, 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. Not every deposit will look like the ones we expect. Some look like effort. Some look like service. Some look like a stuck window that finally gives way under your palm. What makes it 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 the account this summer: it isn’t only filled with rest. It’s filled with permission. This week’s permission was to try something new.
Because here’s what else happened in that cottage. I’ve been hearing a quiet pull lately toward homes themselves, not just what happens inside them, but their bones. I don’t have a name for it yet, and I didn’t need one in that cottage. I just noticed the room the way I’ve always noticed rooms: this one wants to exhale, this window wants more light, the same way I’ve spent years teaching people to notice their own bodies. That counted too. It went in right alongside the bike miles, the ocean, and the garden dirt.
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, dear one, do you.
With so much love, from my corner by the sea, Sarah
