11/5/22

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This is my third post in Megan Kenyon’s The Women’s Chapel Photochallenge.

The prompt is “Place and Space”

The other day my 4-year-old daughter pointed at a picture and said, “why is that stuck there?”

I looked at the picture. It was… a tree…

I said, “well, it’s not stuck, it’s… growing…”

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

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My husband is currently working towards a doctorate in philosophy and bio-ethics. One of his classes has him reading through Dante’s inferno. He also learns a lot from Thomas Aquinas on a super regular basis, and then takes home some gold nuggets to share with me. Amidst our talks about Thomas Aquinas and Dante’s Inferno, I’ve learned Aguinas’ definition of the vice, sloth.

Apparently, according to Thomas Aquinas (and paraphrased by me), to experience sloth means to stop acknowledging the good things in life.

This has put an entire new spin on the word sloth for me.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

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I read the Bible a lot. I have for most of my life. But whenever I read about “sloth”, I usually totally ignore that part. I’ve always thought it was just talking about being lazy. I don’t consider myself to be a lazy person. In fact, I consider myself to be a person who works too hard all the time and doesn’t really know how to stop. So I always thought that the “sloth” parts of the Bible just didn’t apply to me. Ha ha…

I laugh because I now have learned that they in fact very much apply to me.

I actually experience sloth a lot.

I am not lazy, but I do find myself experiencing high levels of overwhelm from time to time. Or my family would call it “tharn.” That’s a word from the book Watership Down, which is a story about rabbits. When a rabbit goes “tharn” it’s basically the same as a deer freezing in the headlights. It’s stuck.

So when I go tharn, I’m definitely not being lazy. It might look the same on the outside, to a stranger. But really, I’m just stuck.

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This photo is a greeting card that I made back in 2011 or so. It is a print of one of my composition book illustrations. In college, in order to pay attention in classes, I colored. I ended up filling four composition books by graduation. This tree is from my first composition book. Good friends of mine will recognize it. I actually ended up using it as kind of my logo for a time.

A long time ago I started selling some of my illustrations as greeting cards. There were a lot of them, so I ended up titling them, to keep them organized. I called this one, Twisted Tree.

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I could write an entire book on this, but I don’t really have the time right now.

So I’ll just say this: I am a Twisted Tree. I am planted in a lot of vocations. I contribute to a lot of ecosystems. On bad days, I feel like I’m stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, because I can’t acknowledge the good things in my life. On good days, I see that the ecosystems are nourishing me, just as I am nourishing them. And I’m not stuck at all… I’m growing… we’re growing… and I’m very very happy within my physical place and my mind-space.