Shh...

On quiet, solitude, and making space for what matters

Quick reminder: two days remain to enter the $100 Bookshop.org gift card giveaway in the May Link-Up. *If you live somewhere Bookshop.org doesn’t deliver, you can still enter. If you win, I’ll send $100 via PayPal instead.

If you’re looking for something a bit more practical today, the May Link-Up also includes some thoughts on movement, strength training, body composition, and the approach I take in my own body and life.

Dearest Reader,

The comments on my last letter—the one where I professed my deep faith in simplicity and consistency, my enduring love for paring things back to their essentials and staying the course—were truly so beautiful.

A few of your shares made me tear up.

There’s just something about hearing about the everyday rituals and practices people return to—about imagining those deeply human, exquisitely intimate moments. Being online so much of the time, consuming so much “content,” I think that’s what I’m trying (often failing) to reach for.

It’s like, I want to peer through this screen and into the quiet, lived moments of lives. I want to get a glimpse of what’s most ordinary, and in that ordinary, sense the beating of another heart. A heart, for all our differences, that’s much like my own.

Anyway, one of those comments spoke to something that’s so essential to all of this for me—and so essential to how I understand and practice simplicity and consistency—that I can’t believe I didn’t think to mention it.

Tami wrote, “To me, simple includes calm and quiet and gentle.”

Yes, yes. Quiet, in particular, feels like air to me.

It’s where I find calm and find God. It’s where I have the best chance of hearing and knowing what matters most. It’s where I can best understand the impact of my choices around food, movement, spiritual practice, being in relationship, everything, everything, everything.

Quiet is where I exhale and inhale the universe.

Quiet is a place that I hunger for and that I go out of my way to create the conditions for—both in my external surroundings, and inside my own head.

Practically speaking, this means choosing to live in the countryside rather than the city (I consider nature sounds part of the quiet, not noise). It means living in a way where my partner and I each have our personal spaces. It means weaving solitude throughout my day: when I do my morning movement practice and meditation outdoors as the sun is rising, when I do my writing and Thai language studies outside while sipping hot chocolate, when I savor my meals slowly while reading something calming or uplifting, when I practice yoga in the late afternoon before dinner, when I practice meditation each night before bed.

It’s not always comfortable or easy to claim this. Not everyone in my life has understood or agreed with me claiming it.

But existing in the modern world as we do—bombarded by the cacophony and machines of too muchness, by endless input and stimulation, by the pressure to fill every silence—and refusing most modern means of soothing and numbing…

Silence and solitude are medicine.

Having access to them impacts not only me, but how I show up for absolutely everyone and everything else. I genuinely don’t understand how people manage our current existence without it.

And of course, much of the noise in my life is inside my own head. And despite my years of practice, despite all the discipline born of devotion I throw at this, I’ve still got it.

It’s gotten better, though, with time. And most importantly, perhaps, I know what makes it better. And a big part of that is—to circle back around—simplicity and consistency.

I hold my daily practices as sacrosanct. I don’t multitask. I don’t watch TV. I’m off social media except Substack. I limit my newsletter subscriptions. I limit my herbs and supplements. I limit my choices. I choose not to drown myself in consumption and noise.

Don’t get me wrong—I can absolutely relate to the pull to add more. Just the other day I was poring through a woman’s write-up of her extensive, expensive morning, afternoon, and evening peptide stacks and biohacks with rapt fascination. All of the excitement, the promise, the hope in the form of a tablet or needle or gadget.

It’s seductive. It’s tempting. It’s energetically deafening.

The body-mind-spirit can only hear and process so much. And that “so much” opens to a vaster expanse than we can even imagine. But if we’re always adding, adding, adding. If we’re always grasping and fixing and numbing and covering over, well.

It leaves me exhausted and scattered.

And to be clear: there’s no “right or wrong” in any of this—truly, to each their own. But my default is to spend long stretches in silence and solitude, to listen deeply, to choose what feels lighter, freer, more spacious. To make space for spirit.

And when I get sidetracked (because I absolutely get sidetracked), quiet is what brings things back into focus. It’s what brings me back to what matters most—including what I already have in my life, remembering to savor each drop, and what I want to attract, invoke, create more of.

Because here’s a little secret I’ve discovered: when I get quiet and still, when I truly appreciate the beauty and miracles that surround me and feel into what I actually want—not by adding more, but by making more space—there’s power in that.

It’s an energy. It’s magnetic. It moves me towards Love.

“Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.”

—Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 12 (trans. Gia-fu Feng & Jane English)

This all relates directly to cultivating a more perfect hunger, by the way. It also relates to the upcoming TCM Deep Dives edition on worry and finding freedom from thought loops.

For now, I’ll leave you with what’s nourishing me and what I’m hungry for—which is very much part of this process and practice.

Where I write—with Tucker keeping watch for geckos.

WHAT’S NOURISHING ME

Local goat’s milk. I’ve mentioned before how our cats have fallen in love with goat’s milk since we moved to Thailand. Well, I recently started buying a version packaged for people, and it turns out I love it, too. My new morning beverage/breakfast is two heaping Tbs of 100 percent cacao powder shaken with boiling water, a pat of organic grassfed butter, a sprinkle of sea salt, and a generous splash of this milk. It feels like a long-overdue replacement for the almond milk I’d been using, which, despite being sugar-free, contains the usual gums and preservatives.

Magnificent mangos. We buy local mangos at least once a week—they are everywhere here, especially in season. But one of the fancy grocers near us has brought in some special varieties lately. They come from a farm in our province but have what I believe are Japanese names (megumi, tsuya). They’re two to three times the size of our usual mangos, more orange than yellow, and slightly more expensive. Their sweetness has complex notes to it—almost like a cross between mango, papaya, and coconut. Regular Thai mangos from outdoor markets remain my favorite. Still, it’s been fun to expand my mango horizons.

Mangos, mangos, mangos.

WHAT I’M HUNGRY FOR

A solo retreat. Speaking of quiet and solitude, I’ve been deeply craving a solo retreat. My last one was just over a year ago, when I spent a week in the sleepy beach town of Cha-am in southern Thailand. The truth is, though, I really, really worry about leaving my cats (one is 15, one is 13, one is probably a year but always getting in trouble). And, yes, I also worry about leaving Randy. It’s silly, I suppose—they can manage just fine without me. But this is something I’ve really struggled with, especially in the last five years. I’m afraid of something happening while I’m away and being unable to get home.

As a compromise, I might try something super local—perhaps someplace rustic in the mountainous jungle nearby. That way, I can indulge in deep silence and solitude for a week while still being able to get home quickly if needed.

I’d love to hear yours.

Part of what excites me about writing these letters is hearing about your lives—what’s supporting you, what you’re wanting more of in the days and weeks ahead.

With that in mind, I’d love to hear:

• What’s nourishing your body, mind, spirit?

• What are you hungry for?

• What’s your relationship to quiet? How do you hear what you most need to hear?

If this resonated, a heart ❤️ helps these letters find their way.

Thank you, with love,
Dana

If you’re returning to the basics and wanting something steady to stay with, paid subscribers receive my Guide to Transformative Eating (you can preview it here).

A paid subscription also includes full access to the TCM Deep Dives series, where we’re currently inside the seven emotions—most recently, joy. Next, we turn towards worry.