I wrote a piece on Substack for the first time in a long time. You can find it here.

Inspired by Paul Kingsnorth’s new essay Lives of Wild Saints, I write about asceticism and motherhood. Here’s a brief glimpse:

I treat my home as a haven and shelter from the storms outside. It is a greenhouse for my children to grow strong and learn to battle the world, the flesh, and the devil. It is where I imperfectly try to lead them, by instruction and example, into a rightly ordered relationship with nature and with each other and with God.
However, that’s not all it is. This is also the place where I engage in combat with the same forces I teach my children to fight. I may not be living in the solitary desert to do battle, but it is still battle.

The Domestic Wilds