Hello for another week, coming to you from a very hot Melbourne. We are hunckered down in the air-conditioning trying to keep ourselves from melting! Hope that you, wherever you are in Australia and even New Zealand, are surviving ok and that your electricity hasn’t decided to pack it in.

Burnout. It seems to be common these days. People are working harder and longer than ever, and when they get home from work they are still connected to work via their phones and computer. There is no shut down time. Even our leisure time is spent looking at screens. People are being told to make sure they practice self care, in order to counteract all the busy-ness and avoid burnout. But what does this actually mean? We read this interesting article on a secular site about what self care isn’t. It is actually worth a read. It talks about how running away from our lives is not actually self care. Even if a spa day, or a mountain of chocolate sounds like it will fix all our problems, it probably won’t. Self care is working on how you actually live your life so you don’t have to run away from it. How we might do this as Catholic might differ to the secular world, but it is still an important point to make for anyone.

Speaking of self care, in our first around the web we linked to an article from First Things on the lost art of the handwritten letter. We here at Anima are big fans of activities that require us to use our senses to create something that we can see, and touch and smell and taste and listen to. They not only help our mind and body connect, recharge and gain new skills, they also feed our souls, since this is what God created us to do. It is part of ‘self care’ if you will.  Handwriting is a very easy way to do this. Erica Tighe, a Catholic artist in the States who specialises in calligraphy, has written a really fabulous book which teaches you “techniques and tips to make your everyday handwriting more beautiful”.  It is great for the beginner and suitable for almost any age, no at. It would make a lovely gift idea for those hard to buy for people.

Last week we posted about a conference in the US on Evanglisation with Bishop Robert Baron. He has just sent out a link to the video if you wanted to catch it and missed it live.

Our last post was on the swiftly approaching season of Lent. Last year, Archbishop Anthony Fisher had this to say about this time in the Church’s calendar.

Bishop Philip Egan from the Diocese of Portsmyth in the UK recently wrote that how important it is that our churches remain open so as to foster prayer, closeness with God as well as vocations.

Fountains of Carrots is a favourite podcast of the editor of this website. They often have a bookclub episode where they tell listeners in advance of what book they are going to discuss.  This one is their discussion on “what Makes a Good Mystery? A Discussion on Chesterton’s Father Brown Stories.

Thanks for reading! We hope you have a lovely weekend.

~ The Anima Team

– Just a note, when we link to a site we are not always endorsing the site as a whole,  we are just highlighting the post of interest on the site.