Goodbye, London
“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller
January 13th, 2025
📍London, England, United Kingdom 🇬🇧
Greetings from the wilderness!
Last week was long and tough, partly due to watching the fires in LA and feeling helpless to support our friends who lost everything in the devastation. To all of you in our community living in LA affected by these fires, I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through right now. My heart is breaking for you. I know multiple people who have lost everything in the devastation. In times like these, “sending love and prayers” doesn’t feel like enough.
If you need a listening ear to ugly cry with, please respond to this email, let’s chat. If there is something else I can do to support you, let me know. And let this community know in The Collective. How can we help?
On this side of the globe, the huge dog I was sitting for was a real handful–minimally trained, high maintenance, and very needy for my attention all week. So needy that she took my glasses off the kitchen counter and chewed them up when I made the mistake of going to the bathroom. I was so glad to leave the countryside behind and head back to London for a weekend of fun excursions.
Over the weekend, I met up with Scott for some touristy moments in his home country. The highlights of our time together were eating our way through Borough Market and touring around the city while enjoying afternoon tea on a double-decker bus converted into a traveling tea house.
Mosaic of Jesus that dates back to the 4th century, during the late Roman occupation, seen in the British Museum
One of the great things about London is that many of its museums are free! So, if you’re on a tight budget like I am, in a city as expensive as London, you will definitely want to check out the Tate Modern, the British Museum, and the Victoria & Albert. While not free, two of my favorite experiences in London are visiting the MOCO Museum and the Frameless immersive art experience (pictured).
I’m flying to Berlin this afternoon, and I’m excited about all the things I plan to do while I’m there. I especially looking forward to meeting up with a friend whom I have only met online (thank you, technology).
With all of these travel-related things going on, I am quite tired. It’s times like these, when my heart is heavy and my body is lagging, that my need for self-care is paramount.
Anyone who’s read through an issue of Loto Living knows that self-care comes in many forms. For me, it often involves hot baths, good books, great music, and nourishing food. But my favorite is art, being creative in any form.
I’ve heard multiple times over this last week alone that people wish they could do more creative activities, but that “they aren’t skilled enough” to do so. My friends, the idea that we aren’t “good enough” to do something is not true when it comes to art. I truly believe that since we are made in the image of God, we are created to create.
To all of you who want to be more creative but don’t feel “good enough” to start, I want to invite you to join me in our newest monthly event series, Artful Communion. I had YOU in mind when I created this. In collaboration with Transforming Creatives, we will be meeting on the fourth Saturday of every month to explore creativity as a way to commune deeply with God, each other, and ourselves.
This month, we will be digging deeper into what it means to be created in the image of the Creator. In February, we will be making line-drawing self-portraits to silence the inner critic telling us we’re not good enough.
And the best part, our Artist in Residence for each month will be supplying you with an original coloring page; if you can color, you can create.
To all of my fellow artists, this is also a space for YOU. Do you love to knit? Paint? Write poetry? You don;t have to color, you can use any medium you like to practice communion with us.
From Visio Divinas to reflection questions and meditations, this is a safe space for you to awaken your creativity and to connect deeply with the Spirit of God.
I hope you will create with me. I will be joining from Berlin, and it would be great to see your smiling faces.
With love,
Jennifer
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