When my first daughter was born, I decided to take the whole year off. I had spent the first few months of her life resisting my new reality: that I now had very little extended time with which to be creative, that what little time I did have was frequently interrupted, and that I didn’t seem to have much of an appetite or the attention span for anything more than reading.

I remember how radical this decision felt: You’re going to what? In our fast-paced product-valued society, it felt almost self-destructive to give a year to not accomplishing. But there was a very clear call inside me to take a year of rest—of focusing on just this new life in front of me and taking good care of myself—and as I said yes to it, I felt my whole body relax into the possibilities of cherishing each moment without the pressure to create anything or work on ideas. The year was, looking back, the best year of my life. I didn’t try. I just lived. (Ironically, after several months of this, I hit my most creative stride EVER, which lasted a few years. Coincidence? I think not.)

During this time, someone gave me a Bjork CD and I fell in love with her song “Undo”.

It's not meant to be a strife
It's not meant to be a struggle uphill
You're trying too hard
Surrender
Give yourself in
You're trying too hard

It's warmer now
Lean into it
Unfold
Unfold in a generous way
Surrender

Undo
Undo
If you're bleeding
Undo
And if you're sweating
Undo
If you're crying, darling
Undo

I danced Iryn around the living room to it, and it helped solidify a new perspective that was taking shape inside me: maybe there was a more effortless place from which I could live and still give birth to my own life; that I could live a bit more openly, more intuitively, and trust the rhythms and intuitions to take me where I needed to go.

This past June, I felt another one of these inner calls for rest and “undoing”. Half-way through July now, I see how much I’d been spinning my wheels all spring. I’ve been sitting on the deck in the evenings watching the colour drain from the sky, reading novels, getting up early just to sit and breathe, sleeping a lot. (Actually, I’ve been doing that for awhile—in May, Ella brought home the Mother’s Day card she made for me at pre-school. It was one of those cards where the kids fill in the blanks: “My mommy has GREEN eyes. My mommy has BLACK hair. My mommy likes to REST .

So I have been resting. And all those papers that are all over my desk of things I should be working on, all the good ideas I keep thinking I should get around to pursuing, they will have to wait. I feel myself filling up, warm liquid pouring into the places that, I realize now, had been feeling very desolate.

I love what my friends Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher are doing over here at Mondo Beyondo.

Dream Lab! What a great concept for a class! They’re all taking the summer off to rest and dream, to let go and see what comes up.

It’s so hard to put on the breaks, and I resist, quite violently sometimes. I’m always shocked to find, after a few days, that I haven’t fallen off the edge of the world, that, in fact, a whole new world starts opening up to me when I take an extended time to call off all the so-called important things I thought I needed to be doing but that were feeling perhaps a bit too heavy to carry. It turns out I don’t do better work when I am trying to carry and balance it all, but that I actually do better work when I operate from a more empty, flat place. Is everyone like this or just me?

Happy summer, everyone. May rest find you for long hours and days no matter what you are doing.

Ella to her friend: Do you know why they call this stuff Kraft Dinner?

Friend: No, why?

Ella: Because you can eat it for dinner or you can make a craft out of it.