“Are we being inspired when we are meant to inspire?” – Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path
This quote was one of the many things that I loved about this book.
I’ve “online known” Erin for a while now, and had the chance to meet her in person at a conference a few years ago. When I first started reading her blog Design for Mankind it was a very different place. Erin’s blog was where I went for interior design inspiration, to learn about up-and-coming contemporary artists, and to find a lot of cool stuff in general. Now it’s where I go to read heartfelt musings about life, writing, motherhood, and love. This woman has a gift of weaving together beautiful phrases to tell honest stories.
P.S. It also doesn’t hurt that the photographs on her website are bright and beautiful.
Before I’d even read the advance copy of Chasing Slow, I was more than happy to join Erin’s launch team. I KNEW that I was going to love the book. I was familiar with some of Erin’s personal story and knew that she was interested in minimalism. That was enough for me. After I got the book I devoured it in less than a week. I found myself nodding in agreement and literally laughing out loud while reading it.
When I read Erin’s story about finding a drawer of leaves in her daughter’s room – her “nature socks” as young Bee called them – I laughed so hard with recognition from my own life with a six-year-old collector that I had to tell Erin about the time I found a cherry tomato in my son’s lego box. “It’s my pet,” he reasoned.
In Chasing Slow, Erin writes about her Christian faith in a more open, loving way that is different from the patriarchal Southern Baptist style that I grew up hearing. While I consider myself to be “more spiritual than religious,” it was a nice change from the fire and brimstone, fear and guilt brand of Christianity that I’m more familiar with.
“I do not know that everything happens for a reason. I know simply that everything happens.” – Erin Loechner, Chasing Slow
When she began the book, Erin spoke of something that a surfing instructor said which she later relates back to her faith.
“Stop relying on your strength, she says. The water is here for you. It’s stronger than you are. Let it do the work. Try again this time with less you and more water.”
I don’t about you, but I think that this is a lesson we all could use no matter our faith – we all could benefit from letting go a little more.
“Perhaps we were never meant to change the pace,” Erin writes. “We were meant to surrender it.”
– Artwork by Melanie Biehle at Minted –
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