The Backward Step

summer vacation ... and a song for The Great Turning

Welcome to The Practice of Life — a place to slow down, befriend yourself, and connect with the world from kindness and awareness. If you’re arriving for the first time, you may enjoy this introduction.

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photo: Maia Duerr

New Moon / July 24, 2025

Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words.
Take the backward step and turn the light inward.
Your body-mind of itself will drop
off and your original face will appear.
If you want to attain just this,
immediately practice just this.

- Dogen

Dear beloved readers,

I am tired.

I would imagine many of you could say the same. Between life, too much time in front of digital screens, hot summer temperatures, and the nonstop onslaught of attacks on our fellow humans and the Earth and all her creatures, I am guessing many of us are feeling heavy hearts and tired bodies.

As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup. My cup feels quite empty right now.

I’m listening to the voice inside me, the rhythm my life is attuned with, and the message is clear: it’s time to take a backward step.

For the next few weeks I’m giving myself a real summer vacation, a time for rest and renewal. I’ll take a break from writing other than continuing to work on my memoir. If you’ve been around The Practice of Life for a while you know that I publish with every new and full moon. My next Post will come out on the August 23 new moon.

A special note for those of you who are paid subscribers. First and foremost – thank you! I sincerely appreciate your ongoing support of my work, it makes a huge difference. I believe everyone deserve paid time off, including writers, so by default I won’t be pausing payments this month. However if you would like to pause your own payment or make any other changes to your subscription, you are welcome to do so. This page gives you all the options to manage your subscription. I ask that you please make any changes or cancellations to your account there and not through your bank. As I and other Substack writers have learned the hard way, stopping payments through your bank can trigger a fraud alert in Stripe, the payment processor, and things get all kinds of complicated from there.

On another note (pun intended!) I want to share a song, “We Shall Be Known,” that I heard for the first time today and fell in love with it. Joanna Macy’s passing this week is very much in my heart right now and this song evokes The Great Turning in a beautiful way.

In this Great Turning we shall learn to lead in love

I’ll leave you with a few images from summer here in Northern New Mexico. It’s a beautiful time of year, and I hope you will feel mudita (a Sanskrit word that means sympathetic joy) at the thought of me immersing myself in the natural world and giving my soul time to regenerate. I look forward to seeing you in August and returning to The Practice of Life with fresh new writing and perhaps some other surprises.

with much gratitude,

Maia

p.s. Feel free to dive into my archives if you’re missing my writing!