Jonna Higgins-Freese

Jonna Higgins-Freese is environmental outreach coordinator at Prairiewoods: Franciscan Spirituality Center in Hiawatha, Iowa. She is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.

Thank God it's Friday. I love my work, and I feel lucky to be able to spend my days in this beautiful setting, but enough is enough.

I find it hard to simplify my time commitments, even though part of my job is to give presentations and convene study circles on voluntary simplicity and conscious living. Every week, I share with others great resources on these topics, such as Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective and materials developed by the Center for a New American Dream and the Northwest Earth Institute.

Still, I find that on the rare Sunday mornings that I'm not giving a presentation in someone else's church, I'm often too exhausted to attend my own Quaker meeting. While I'm persuading others to join CSAs and shop at farmers markets, the fresh produce from my own CSA share is wilting in the box, unused.

I'm especially conscious of the fragmented and unmindful ways I often spend my time because I just came back from a week's retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge, a wilderness ranch and contemplative retreat center located in the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico. Vallecitos recognizes that contemplative awareness, personal growth, and spiritual development all contribute to the efficacy of nonprofit leaders and organizations. For five days, I spent the mornings meditating and the afternoons exploring the retreat center and nearby Carson National Forest on snowshoes and skis.

Tacked onto the bulletin board outside Vallecitos' meditation hall is a quote from Trappist monk Thomas Merton that sums up the need for activists in particular to seek quiet and rest:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence ... [and that is] activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Wayne Muller, founder of Bread for the Journey, is more direct. In Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, he writes:

Our lack of rest and reflection is not just a personal affliction. It colors the way we build and sustain community, it dictates the way we respond to suffering, and it shapes the ways in which we seek peace and healing in the world ... [Because we do not rest], the way problems are solved is [usually] frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly.

One of the gifts religious and spiritual practice offers to the environmental movement is this recognition of the importance of rest, reflection, and being. The Buddhist tradition speaks in terms of meditation and mindfulness, a state of inner peace and happiness that is available to us in each moment. The Jewish and Christian traditions offer the Sabbath. Although Sabbath has sometimes been practiced, especially by Protestants, as a dreary time when strict rules prohibited any joy or fun, the gospel of Mark specifically says: "You are not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath is made for you."

Wayne Muller argues that Sabbath is any time we use for sacred rest, whether it's a day, an hour, a walk, or a single breath. Behind the traditional rules and prohibitions of the Sabbath is "an idea that by saying no to making some things happen, deep permission arises for other things to happen. When we cease our daily labor, other things -- love, friendship, prayer, touch, singing, rest -- can be born in the space created by our rest. Walking with a friend, reciting a prayer, caring for children, sharing bread and wine with family and neighbors -- those are intimate graces that need precious time and attention."

With all that in mind, I think it's time to stop so I can hike one of Prairiewoods' trails before lunch. I've been so busy doing environmental work, I haven't been down to the creek in weeks. I'll end this week with an appropriate quote from Edward Abbey, who sums things up better than I could:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am -- a reluctant enthusiast ... a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.