Dear Creator — The Quiet Shape of Peace

Notes from the Hollow Bone | entry twenty

Dear Creator,

A friend told me I looked happy today.
I smiled, but what I felt wasn’t happiness—it was something quieter, deeper.
Contention, maybe. Or peace. The kind that doesn’t need proof or plan.

I’ve spent most of my life chasing ease—making things simpler, more efficient, more comfortable. I thought peace would be on the other side of all that effort. But it never was. The more I tried to control, the less I felt held.

Now, stripped of all the noise, I am starting again—by choice and by circumstance, but I choose to see it as by grand design. I am back at the beginning, learning the basics: how to move slower, how to listen longer, how to work with my hands again. Burning leaves, cutting branches, tending the land. Things I never did as a city girl. Things that don’t make life easier, but make it truer.

Out here, peace isn’t an achievement. It’s an arrival.
It’s the wind that stirs just when the heat becomes too much.
It’s the way the land seems to breathe with me.
It’s the silence that no longer feels empty, but full of conversation.

I am learning that simplicity is not lack—it is abundance without excess.
That the ground gives what it can when I stop asking for more.
That the world was never meant to be conquered or perfected; it was meant to be lived with.

 There is no schedule here, no clear next step, and strangely, no panic.
Just the pulse of something steady beneath my feet,
and the soft knowing that I am exactly where I need to be—
not because I earned it, but because I finally stopped running from it.

 Maybe this is peace, Creator—
not the one the world sells,
but the one the earth teaches.
The kind that doesn’t come when I fix everything,
but when I finally let everything simply be.

With Grace & Ink,
Mai