What does a day of rest look like? Close your eyes. Imagine it. But be practical. Given everything you have around you right now – the blessings, the responsibilities, the attachments, the gifts – what does your day of rest look like? Is it something you can create right here and now?

My day of rest begins alone with the dawn for an hour’s walk at Shoreline. It’s my meditation, these walks. My day of rest ends with Ben and I together, sharing a glass of wine on our little porch.

What happens in between?

If it is Sunday we go to the Farmer’s Market just a block away. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve been there in the three years I’ve lived on this street. The truth is I have an aversion to meandering. I can’t stroll. And that seems to be what people do at farmers’ markets. People meander, stroll and stop to compare prices of broccoli between two identical looking organic stalls before waving to friends half a block away who are sampling some juicy white fleshed peaches.

But it’s my day of rest and I’m happy to ‘fake it ‘till I make it’. I slow my natural gallop to an easy trot. Pretty soon I’m learning everything there is to know about raw brined olives in a lecture delivered by a stranger from Half Moon Bay while Ben decides between the oils the stall owner has poured into tiny paper communion cups.
An hour later we have two canvas bags filled with fresh fruit and vegetables to last us the week and 12 ounces of expensive extra virgin with which to dress the heirloom tomatoes.

And I have learned how to meander and stroll.

On my day of rest, which is Ben’s day of rest, too, we walk home to put our bounty away and then head out again for a late brunch. We find a place within walking distance where we can sit outside bathed in sunlight and surrounded by the joy of children running circles around their parents’ legs and the bright colors of summer. We linger over the meal and soak in the sounds of life – sounds so different from the ones to which we are accustomed. Layers of happy conversation, the bossy ‘cawk’ of a crow, the yip of a curly-haired doodle dog, the occasional cry of an infant. The sounds of life. A different sort of music.

On our day of rest we return from brunch and settle with a cup of tea. We read for leisure the books we started months ago. Books with pages made of paper that we turn one by one. Or we walk to the movie theater not twenty minutes away and take in an early matinee with all the other people who don’t like to stay out too late on a Sunday. Or we nap. It’s our day of rest. We can do anything we want.

Towards the end of our day of rest, Ben and I open that bottle of Pinot that’s been waiting for a moment like this. We sit on our little porch and talk to one another like two people deeply in love and separated for too long by work and commitments to other things. We talk to one another with real words that float up from our hearts and linger in the air around us. The sky changes from bright blue to dusky pink and pale orange.

What does your day of rest look like?