Nothing Is Happening This Week
The second week of August is the quietest week of the year, and almost nobody rests in it.
Offices are half empty. Email goes unanswered for days without consequence. Whoever you were going to hear from is on a beach somewhere and will get back to you. Eventually.
Almost nobody rests during this time.
Because September is already visible from here. The supply lists are out. The syllabus is due. The fall calendar has started filling from the far end. You can see the whole thing coming, and seeing it is enough to keep you from putting anything down.
That is the particular condition of this week. Not busyness per se, but anticipation, which does the same work as busyness while producing nothing.
The garden is doing something else. My pepper plants are still setting fruit and have no information about September. Not one thing in the yard is preparing. The light shortens a little each evening, and the plants respond to the light itself rather than to a forecast of it.
I am not going to tell you that is wisdom. Plants cannot worry, so their calm costs them nothing.
But there is something available here that will not be available in three weeks, and it is not more time. It is a week with little scheduled in it, which is the rarest thing you get all year, and it disappears whether or not you use it.
Go outside this week while the world is briefly not asking.
September will still arrive.
What does this week look like where you are? I am curious whether anyone has managed to actually rest in it, or whether September is pulling at you the way it is pulling at me.
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The Rewilding the Soul EcoSpirituality Certificate at Cherry Hill Seminary, where I teach, is currently underway with this year’s cohort. The September 2026 Contemplative Walking Retreat I am leading on this same section of the Le Puy Camino is full. New offerings, including future retreats and additional teaching opportunities, will be announced here in the months ahead. For now, the practice itself is what matters most, and it is available to you wherever you are walking this week.
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I feel very seen, Jeffrey. Many exciting things begin this fall, and I just have to get there.