The Remembrance Codes

Sacred Slowing: The Return to Rhythm

• Susan Sutherland

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This summer I traveled with my family through Portugal and Spain, and the experience changed me. I noticed things that felt small at first - like the way people linger over meals, the way shops close in the afternoon, the way rest is woven into the fabric of life. But together, these moments stirred something deeper in me about rhythm, nourishment, and what it really means to live well.

In this episode, I share what I carried home with me - the contrasts I felt rin my body, the questions that rose as I returned to American pace, and the practices I’m beginning to reclaim in my own home. This isn’t a travel recap. It’s an invitation to slow down, listen differently, and reimagine the cadence of your days.

I shared more of my journey through the cathedrals and castles on my Patreon in collection named The Land Remembers. 

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Remembrance Codes. I am Susan Sutherland and I'm glad you're here. Today we are going to talk about the return to rhythm, to a sacred slowing down. I went away for a couple of weeks. My family and I went to Spain and Portugal. Actually, we went to Portugal and then Spain, which felt purposeful and was planned that way. Portugal has a little more of the divine feminine feeling and we ended up in Barcelona, which was very masculine, very metropolitan, and that was a sacred severing, a perfect way for us to be ready for the return. Sacred severing, a perfect way for us to be ready for the return, because had I had our last stop in one of the other places, I may not have wanted to leave.

Speaker 1:

It was such an incredible journey to understand the rhythm of society, of our own family, of our own nervous systems and kind of check in with that. And so I want to tell you what I experienced and kind of the souvenirs I brought home with me, these little nuggets I packed and I'm trying to weave back into the rhythm that I have here. It was a fun experience because I started a travel blog when I was in Colorado and I continued it through my overseas trip and I told a friend of mine that what it felt like for me is showing my work, like when your kid has a math problem and they have to write down how they are doing the problem. It helps kind of solidify the process for them. And that is what the travel blog did for me. There was plenty I didn't write and share publicly, but much of what came through and little aha moments I was able to kind of press into my memory and to my knowing by writing and sharing those experiences, and what I found is that the things that I had written about kept blooming. I planted the seed in the soil of this blog and it continued to kind of reveal itself layer by layer for me, and so I really want to encourage you on this journey.

Speaker 1:

Whether it is spiritual awakening or parenting or or whatever your life experiences are, when you have things that feel important, feel like timestamp moments like this was something for me, write it down, find a way to document it. If not to share publicly, that's totally fine, but as a way of planting a seed that will continue to open and to bloom because you have nurtured it in a special way, even if you just acknowledge it out loud in your car. That's something. But I feel like when we take the time to process thoughts well enough to put them on paper, we've kind of cultivated the seed for that to really open up and bloom and it just kept giving and giving and giving. And so I really want to encourage that as a practice for you to take these moments we are given and and cultivate them. Cultivate them because there is so much in in the offering of when we are intentional about what we're provided, these little insights, what we're provided, these little insights, these little nuggets. When we really take time and nurture them, they just continue to bloom. Now they'll do that anyway, but I'm telling you, the amount of awareness you will bring to it and what you can extract from it is so much greater when you have that time and that nurturing put into it. So I really want to offer that to you.

Speaker 1:

That was one of the main things I brought home with me. Is is how special doing that was. If people read it, great. If you read it, great. Thank you for journeying with me. If not, it's still available. It's, it's out there for the world to see and I'll link it in the show notes. But it was really about a practice of me taking these moments and putting words to them, having to wrap my mind around them well enough to put it out there. Now.

Speaker 1:

What I want to talk to you today about is the rhythm the rhythm of life over there compared to how I experience it here in America. It is so different and it created some complexity in how we understand life, femininity and how we go about our day-to-day rhythm here. And I will tell you there it is slower, everything is slower. If you see someone hurried walking down the street, you can bet your bottom dollar that they are American, that they are in a rush, because Americans even we just move quickly. We have been trained to move quickly, that the more you accomplish, the better. Right, the speedier you do things and the pace is slower. And for a few days I had this like come on, get on with it. When you sit in a restaurant and you're waiting for someone to come greet you and it's like, okay, are they coming? And it took a couple of days to settle into the fact that why am I so hurried? We have been trained to be efficient and get in and get out, and how quickly can we do everything? And it is so programmed in us that it took a couple of days before we settled into a new rhythm of patience, of waiting and waiting being okay. Waiting means we are still gathered around a table as a family and everything doesn't have to be so rushed.

Speaker 1:

It was really quite amazing for us to have a car very little of the time. There was three days that we had a car and the rest of it we were on foot and it was so beautiful to walk to your meal to kind of create a hunger in movement, but also to walk away from your meal to allow it to settle without, you know, jumping straight back in your car and straight back on your couch. There was just so much more movement and and I have to realize that some of this was because I was on vacation we weren't getting this movement. But also I want you to realize that this is because it's the culture Now in Lisbon. It's because the streets are about three feet wide. There is not room for a bunch of cars to be on the road, but it's also very walkable, provided you are really good at steep hills, and I loved being on foot. I loved planning a dinner and instead of seeing what the traffic is going to be like, seeing what the best path to walk. It felt so amazing and my husband suffered a little in one of the cities when it was a hundred degrees but it was also a hundred degrees in Charlotte and humid, so you know, dry your eyes, cowboy. Let's walk to dinner, we're fine.

Speaker 1:

But I loved that culture of being on foot Now, still had this settled, restful nature about it but was also walkable. That was the culture was to walk and get your groceries and walk and have your meals and to slow down. Everyone seemed to linger around a table and when we were in, I say Seville. I think they say Sevilla and I would hate to butcher that, as I probably just did, but we say Seville here and it is in the Southern part of Spain. And I'm telling you that city captured my heart because it was so slow paced. It had the elements of a city, not really like metropolitan, you know, starbucks on every block kind of feeling. But it had lots of cafes. It had a decent amount of people, I think over 600,000. I don't do research for my episodes so that may or may not be true, but it had a city feeling. It had so much history. I had a beautiful river too, actually, but we only saw one because it was near where we were doing our walking. We saw the old river and everything was just slow.

Speaker 1:

And you know what they did, y'all? They shut down stores in the afternoon, they shut down most restaurants in the afternoon and they rested. Do you know why they rested? Because they have dinner between 10 and 11 o'clock. So if you know me, you know that it's not a schedule that I typically hold. But hey, when in Seville, do as they do, right, and so we did. We took on their schedule and I just loved how slow everything felt, how intentional and purposeful and lingering it felt. And we were there on a Sunday and I'm telling you, every store was closed. They understand the purpose of rest. They understand the purpose of being close to home and going and being in your home and tuning your home in the afternoon, whereas it feels like in America, so many people leave out the door and they clock their 12 hour workday and they come home just to sleep and then they leave again. We have this cycle of working so hard to pay for things that we don't have time to enjoy, and there it just felt different.

Speaker 1:

And I will tell you that we went to a beach when we were in Portugal on the Algarve coast, and the beach was packed full of people and we went to a specific area because I have a redhead and we needed to rent the umbrella. We had no beach things with us, so we got some chairs and the umbrella so we could have a little bit of shade. So we were on. We were at a quite a busy beach. I did not see one single bottle or can of alcohol on the entire beach beach not one.

Speaker 1:

And I started thinking about it because when you go to our beach, that's all you see is groups of people. They're coolers of beer, they're out there, they're drinking the entire day. So I really mulled this around in my head and I thought it's not that they're anti-alcohol, because if you see people they're having wine at lunch, they might have wine at dinner or a beer or whatever. It's not like. It's a non-drinking culture. I never saw one single person drunk.

Speaker 1:

What I did realize is they've created a culture that they don't have to escape from. They don't need to go and just blitz themselves on a Saturday to recover from their week, because they have built in this intentional time, this intentional rest, they slow down and just don't feel so pressed, so hurried, so rushed for everything, so hurried, so rushed for everything, and I admired it so much that they they seem to be enjoying life for the right reasons. So we had a lot of conversations while we were away about the food and how it feels in your body, like it feels different in your body to eat a croissant there or to have bread there. Everything feels different and I ate foods that I don't typically eat here. I ate while I was away and I'm telling you they have an ice cream culture that blows your mind. Every third shop is a ice cream place, a gelateria, and we partook heavily. We had lots of ice cream. Especially when it's 100 degrees, that is a good way to spend your afternoon is getting ice cream and I felt okay with foods that I wouldn't eat.

Speaker 1:

Now, a lot of that has to do with the toxins that are in our food. Let's be real. It has to do with how we farm our food. I am more sensitive. We all are sensitive, right? Our bodies are building these blocks. We have so much illness, we have so much obesity because of how our food is created and we were having a lot of conversations about this as a family, talking about healthy lifestyle practices, about walking to food, about, you know, just the differences in the cultures there versus here, and I think it's really good to expose your children when you are able to other cultures and really take note of how things are done differently. We are so convenient space. We're used to hopping in our car and going anywhere we want, and they're like parking when we did have a car, parking is a bit of a chore. Navigating is a bit of a chore with these tiny little roads, and having these conversations was really important.

Speaker 1:

And when I got to Barcelona, it was really interesting because my stomach said no more. I started having really bad cramps, I was really uncomfortable and what I realized is now the food necessarily had not changed. Okay, because I don't think they've got toxins in Barcelona that they didn't have in Seville. What changed was my environment, right, so I'm now in a city with so many people. They have a wide sidewalks that are completely full of people. It had lots of traffic, lots of noise, a lot of artificial noise around. It was not a clean environment and my nervous system now said no, you can have one or the other. If you give me peace and calm somewhere, I can be a little flexible with you, but if you are going to stick me in the middle of the city with all of this external chaos, you need to be mindful of what you put in your body, and so that last little stretch we had was very city.

Speaker 1:

My body was very uncomfortable, and I was able to see the difference of how we experience life and food when we are in those busy environments. When our nervous system is taxed externally from our environment, it cannot deal with the same amount of complexity. I'll call it complexity, not just ice cream that we put in our body. And what we have in America is we have bad food, we have toxic food, and we have these environments that are full of noise and chaos, and everybody's got cars in a rushed pace, and so I really was having this complicated inner dialogue. First of all, I will tell you that Barcelona was the perfect last stop because it put me on my path home. Okay, let's go back. I can do this, having these conversations with my family, and I have been having these conversations with myself, and I'm sitting there and just so many downloads coming through, but I kind of heard myself and I tried to be mindful now, not to talk so much trash about our food system in America, because my cells are listening and this is the food I have access to. But I also think that we have created a culture that has amplified food allergies, because we have essentially trained our body to be afraid of food and created these reactions. That's a whole different topic, but we amplify problems by basically energizing them.

Speaker 1:

When I was in the plane, I was really thinking about what do I do now? Because part of me wants to pack up and move and find myself in this slower pace, in a rhythm that my body felt comfortable in. But y'all, I have a senior this year and it matters where I live for his residency, for college, it matters proximity for him to be able to come home to. My little girl starts high school this year. When I think of the logistics of just packing up and making an easier time for my body somewhere else, I realized that that easy time is not necessarily good for my family. So what do I do? And when I'm sitting on the plane on the way home, I started realizing that how I'm thinking about it allows me to be a victim of the system and a victim of our government that is not supporting us in policy. They are not supporting us in our healthcare or in our food system. But I'm in control of me, and that's what I realized is, wait a second, this rhythm that I feel so subject to. I choose my rhythm and I choose my food, and I'm not going to be a victim of this situation. So I started having a lot of downloads about what I can do to make sure that the rhythm that I bring home with me is the one I want, and it was like a beautiful plane ride. It was like pop, pop, pop, and I got off of it and it was like, yes, I am here, I'm going to do it.

Speaker 1:

Europe packed up and they came home with me and y'all, we're in the Washington Dulles Airport. We sat down and ordered a salad and within five minutes after getting the salad, our flight had been canceled to Charlotte. There were storms in the area and we had a very jacked up travel to get to Portugal An extra 15 hours sitting in Heathrow. We weren't even meant to fly through Heathrow, so it had been a chaotic trip to get there, and all we wanted to do at this point is get home, and if there are storms in the area in DC, that's not going to get us home on a different airline. So we ended up renting a car and driving, and it was, I guess, a five and a half hour drive. But we're also now pushed against our exhaustion. Right, we now have to hurry to race home, because we ended up getting home at what would have been 5.30 in the morning in Barcelona. So it was kind of this immediate urgency, this push back into the pace of hurriedness, of getting things done.

Speaker 1:

And when I woke up the next morning I just felt the weight of being here and I decided that I would spend the week journaling about rhythm and just allowing what comes up for me to come up, and that's a really. It's a good way to reset, but it's also a good way to break out of patterns is you have to be able to witness them and you have to be able to see where you are being called. And one of the things I loved over there was hanging up my clothes and I know that sounds really ridiculous and your towels feel like sandpaper when they have not been dried in a tumble dryer. If you're used to that there's a lot. That is not exactly the best, but I loved the practice of it. I loved just having them hanging in the sunshine, and so I ordered myself a clothing rack and I ordered myself some clothespin, because there are some things I can bring home here and that next day I had actually not posted my podcast.

Speaker 1:

It normally goes on a Thursday and I decided when I was on vacation I was trying to figure out how to do it from my phone this, that and the other and then I was like, what are you doing? It's not that deep, it is just not that deep. So I did that the next day and did a few little things, but what I really wanted to do was go to the farmer's market. I wanted to go and use this new app. I found it is called Yuka, y-u-k-a, and it is an app. It has some pay for features, but the free feature is that you can scan products and you can see additives.

Speaker 1:

Because one of the things I realized on the plane is, while I don't want toxins in my food, I have not been diligent to realize when I am purchasing them, when I am contributing to the system that I want to break away from and I have to do better, not just reading the labels, because our labels are very intentionally misleading. They are trying to make you think something's healthy when it very much is not, and I have to do better. If I want to say that I'm not participating in a system that is trying to poison me, then what steps am I taking? So I went to the farmer's market and then I went to the grocery store and it was like two hours out of the house because I was very slowly going through and choosing products based on how healthy they are, how few toxins and additives that they have in them, and it took a long time and part of me felt guilty about this that I've been gone for two weeks.

Speaker 1:

I had scheduled some posts to go live while I was away but I hadn't been doing anything, and that is so American, isn't it? Like I need to show up, I need to do things, and Mark and I ended up having an argument and I know it was because he was reflecting this back to me this hurry up and go get stuff done, and he and I ended up having to have a conversation about it and once I had done my journaling to get through that situation. He was like I actually value so much when you prepare food. This is what's complicated, you guys. I came back wanting to be a homemaker, right, not not to quit working, but to really have presence when I am folding clothes, when I'm hanging them out to dry, when I am cutting vegetables. To bring this presence back into these activities that in America we speed through, like how fast and how convenient and how rushed can everything be to get food on the table, to get to the next thing, everything has to be multitask. Like can you do this while you're doing this? Everything is so fast and what I came back with the desire is to just put everything on 0.5 speed and go slow, fold clothes with intention, take my dog out, not with my phone in my hand, but to look around and talk to the birds you know everything just to be more purposeful.

Speaker 1:

And what I found is how complicated our relationship with homemaking is in this country. Women felt hard for our ability and permission and rights to work in this country and I value their efforts for allowing us to have a presence in companies, in government, to have a voice not only in the classroom but in the board, to show up in ways that we need to be represented. I value that so tremendously and I was very lucky to be able to work from home. I felt like I straddled both. I got to have the best of both worlds.

Speaker 1:

But what you find when we put women back in the workplace is it didn't diminish their roles at home. They're now expected to do it all and to do it all while also going to the gym and eating healthy and taking their kids to a hundred, sports and doing everything. And we've lost that rhythm, we've lost the balance and it's hard to speak up and want to find that again when you have those on the far right that are saying that the women's place is in the home, but they're saying it from a place of superiority or distorted patriarchy, and so then it's like feels icky to be like actually I really want to tend my home with love and y'all. We have made it where there's thorns everywhere for us to really nourish the things that need to be nourished, which is ourselves and our family and our homes in a way, because we've lost the value of what that means. It has somehow become some inferior role that you do if you can't work outside of the home or if your husband won't let you work outside of the home, it's your husband won't let you work out of the side of the home. It's just got this distorted feeling to it. So what we have to restore, in addition to our rhythm, is our values and our knowing that motherhood is priestess work, that tending your home is of so much value. They allowed it to to switch, to switch the narrative to where we. We work in the home. We do the things in the home to enable them to work outside of the home instead of the other way around. Instead of, everything we're doing is so that we can tend our home and tend our family and bring nurturing back to where it should be.

Speaker 1:

And it is really complicated. I'm sure, even listening to this, you've probably had a couple moments where you're like prickly feeling like, oh, you know that's scary to say I need to nourish my home or I need to slow down with laundry. But the point is we've commodified everything. Everything has to be about making money or about advancing something, and we've lost the value system that nurturing each other and creating within a home has such sacred value. We've got this culture where our food is fast and our conversations are brief and surface level, and even our rest is surveilled by apps. Your rest is not restful when you're sitting on your phone, and we've got this culture where we never allow our nervous systems to just stabilize.

Speaker 1:

So I've spent the week really reflecting on what are my to-dos and which ones are actually urgent, which ones do I create urgency for and which ones actually have value, and I've had to kind of shift some of my practices. First of all, laundry is eternal, absolutely eternal, but it is not urgent. And if reading a couple of chapters in my book on the patio when it's raining serves me better, my goal is to choose that. My goal is also to fold laundry as if it is purposeful and meaningful, and that is going to take some practice. Maybe when I get back into a rhythm it will feel like that. It is my goal, and I'll tell you it's not one I have achieved yet.

Speaker 1:

But I have been more purposeful in my preparation of dinner. I have told everyone, including myself, for a long time that I don't like cooking, which has created this narrative where it feels like such a chore instead of something I'm pouring my heart into. And so going to the farmer's market with specific vegetable dishes that I wanted to prepare made that time more meaningful, and I am trying to put on fun music and embrace my time in the kitchen a little better, and when I do that in a means of meal prepping so that I don't have to do it twice a day for meals, then that definitely feels better. But I am trying to infuse love and divinity into those mundane tasks, to bring that value back there, because that's what my time overseas showed me is how distorted we are with what we value in our society, how, how we don't value rest and our bodies make us pay for it. We have so much sickness and illness and just fatigue and obesity and all of these things because our nervous system never is allowed to settle.

Speaker 1:

So I'm asking you to join me in my crusade to bring back rhythm, to find our cycles as women to be purposeful, to find our cycles as women to be purposeful. There are times in your month that you might feel super engaging, right? Because usually I think that that ovulation week where it's like, hey, I'm going to get out there, I want to do the things I want to, and this is great to tap into those moments that is when you set up meetings, that is when, when you really engage with people, no-transcript slamming it and now I feel so lazy Girl, that's okay, that's purposeful. So I want you to join me, so I, I want you to join me, especially my American sisters here. What have we done? What have we done to ourselves? I know that I got home and just a couple of days later, fall sports started. We have pre-season camp, we've got tryouts during the week, we have a tryout on Saturday.

Speaker 1:

Like what in the world for a school sport Like it is, it is something all the time and although I signed up for this my kids are super geared up for this I am refusing to allow myself to get back in a pattern and a pace that doesn't feel settled and that means I'm going to have to do way more preparation to make sure those mealtimes go smoothly, that I am not sucked back into the fast culture, the convenience culture, because I really don't want that for me or my kids, or my body. I want us to have nutrient rich foods. I want us to have life force fed into our bodies instead of packaged products, which y'all, once you start using that app, it is. It is mind blowing, uh, and I thought it was doing pretty well before, and even some of those like power protein bars. Goodness gracious, you got no idea what you're eating. I'm gonna tell you.

Speaker 1:

So anyway, I do want to invite you back into rhythm of the body, of the earth, of your home, and let's get rid of this artificial urgency. Let's start tending like it is our purpose Our gardening, our folding, our preparing, our parenting. They are not mindless tasks, they are portals. This is how we receive the earth, with intention, with connection to the earth, to self, to others, to source. It is rhythm, as devotion and as prayer, not because we are not entitled to go hustle to the very top of the ladder, but because we are worthy of staying on the ground ladder, but because we are worthy of staying on the ground. So I hope you find rhythm as we start back to school, as we start back to sports and kind of this new pattern.

Speaker 1:

Listen to your body, know that your rest is so important for your body to heal, for it to create, for it to allow this open channel to your intuition. You need to nurture your body and part of nurturing is honoring rest. So if that is what your body is calling for, it is not to be met with guilt but honored. Okay. So this is your reminder that rhythm is a birthright, it is not a luxury and that when it is done by choice and not expectation, it really is holy. And our invocation that I am going to close with this week let the kitchen become the temple, the garden, the page, the quiet hour. Not idleness but initiation. Let us no longer fight for freedom in the language of conquest, but in the cadence of care. Take it easy this week, take it slow, take it purposeful, and I'll see you next week.

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