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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 747: How to Carry a Heavy Life | Shannan Martin, Counterweights
00:54:44
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- [00:01]
A
If you're a parent, you know how hard it is to find drinks that are actually good for your kids and still taste good enough that they'll drink them. That's why we have been loving Cure Hydration. I always read the label before I let my kids have anything and Cure checks every box. Their hydration packs for adults are plant based, have no added sugar and only 25 calories. I use them in the mornings to jumpstart my water intake or when we're traveling, especially flights, because they just make staying hydrated easier. Lemonade is probably my favorite right now. It's clean, light, and never tastes artificial. And since it hydrates better than water alone, I actually feel the difference. The kids mixes have been a big shift in our house. My kids used to resist plain water, especially after being outside all day. Now they will happily drink Cure. It's formulated with pediatricians, free of artificial flavors and major allergens, and has no added sugars. We use it after sports, long outdoor days, or even when someone's feeling rundown. Staying hydrated isn't just about water. You also need electrolytes. That's why my family loves Cure. It's clean, tastes great, and my kids love it. You can grab Cure on Amazon or find a store near you@cure hydration.com outside. Real ingredients, real hydration ready for the whole family. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Jenny Urge. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside and I'm so excited that Shannon Martin is back. Welcome, Shannon.
- [01:18]
B
I'm so happy to be back. Thank you.
- [01:20]
A
I love when this kind of thing happens because I loved your book. It starts with hello, and you so graciously came on to talk about it and then you have a new book coming out. So it worked out well. I get a second chance to spend time with you. This is a fantastic book about. Well, the subtitle is an essential practice for holding hope in a heavy world. And it's about the balancing of the hard and the good. And the book is called Counterweight. It's beautiful. I'm holding up actually. I have like a binder version. It got printed out and they put like a. What is this even called? The spiral binding.
- [01:52]
B
Like a little spiral. Yeah.
- [01:54]
A
Yes. It was like that far in advance, but this book is out now and you can go pick up a copy. I love this whole concept. I mean, I didn't really know what it was gonna be, but I knew that I'd love start with hello. So I was excited to read it. And you talk in this one a lot about your dad. Like, what an interesting dad. He, like, he's into gardening and he builds things and he just passes on this wisdom. And this is sort of leading into the concept of the book, the title, Counterweights. So if you wouldn't mind, I'd love have you tell us about your dad, Dwight.
- [02:25]
B
I would too. Dwight, Yes, I just saw him yesterday. So I live in Indiana, I grew up, and my parents are still in southwestern Ohio, but I was just there yesterday with him. So yes, I owe the, the premise of this book to my dad. And I've, I've sort of merged him with the poet Rila, who talks about, you know, the beauty and the terror that life is built of. Beauty and terror. My dad's part of this. And let me pause and say my dad is far from a poet. Okay. He is like as practical Midwestern blue collar construction worker, you know, like brawny and outdoorsy. That's who my dad was all throughout my growing up years. Did not go to college. I mean, brilliant man, but just in a different lane, like so brilliant of a mind and just amazed me all the time. But when I was a young child, I'm a middle child, so my siblings and I, I have a very clear memory of walking across the barnyard to get to the big barn with my dad. And he told me, if you're struggling to carry something heavy, which I must have been, I mean, I was young. So it's like a hazy fever dream of a memory. But he said, if you're struggling to carry something heavy, the easiest way to do that is to carry something equally heavy in the other hand. And at the time he was carrying a bucket, he was probably carrying two buckets of maybe grain for the cows. I don't know what was in those buckets. And so I remember thinking at the time in my young brain, like, this does not make sense. Like, how are you telling me carrying more heavy things will make it easier? But he sort of demonstrated, you know, if you're carrying one heavy thing, you're lurching to the side, you're kind of dragging, you might tip over. But as soon as you put something equally heavy, another bucket, and in that other hand, it pulls you back to center and it allows you to have that momentum you need to carry on and move forward. And so my dad was not trying to give me a philosophical lesson on anything. He was just trying to help me carry heavy things. As I got older and, you know, I became a writer and I am Not a poet, but I think I maybe have the brain of a poet at times. I'm always searching for metaphors, and they come to me maybe more easily than for some people. And years and years ago, I mean, 10 years or more, I started to think of this idea of. Of having two buckets. So in one bucket, we have the heavy things that hurt, the things that we wish we could put down, but we can't. The things that we did not ask for and would have never asked for. And yet we are. They are part of our life. We cannot control them. We have to carry them. But we have this other bucket, our other hand, that we can choose to fill with heavy goodness and heavy beauty and heavy joy and heavy rest, and all of the things that it requires for us to come back to center, to keep our heads above water, and to keep moving forward. And so, over time, that idea of these two buckets, I started to envision it almost like a scale. You know, we've got these two ends of the scale. And this idea of counterweights, it's something more than counting our blessings, which just, you know, there's nothing wrong with counting our blessings or making a gratitude list. A lot of people do that. Counterweights is a bit different because it requires to. It requires us to acknowledge both buckets. It requires us. It demands of us, really, to give attention to the heavy things and to the things that help lift us up a little bit. And so it's outside of that idea of just focusing on the positive. It's saying, this is your life. This is what is being thrown at you. You have to figure out how to carry it all. And with this idea of counterweights, that gives us a framework and a really simple practice that we can do all the time to help us continue to move forward.
- [06:26]
A
Shannon. I love it. I love it. What a mental picture. Because then you go through all of these different examples in the book of your own life. You're like, when your leg starts to swell or, you know, it's still swollen,
- [06:39]
B
Jenny, like, as we speak. Like, that's a part of my life now. And it's the weirdest health situation. I remember thinking, you know, there are people dying of cancer. There are people suffering these horrible things. I have this stupid leg that stays swollen all the time, but it doesn't hurt. I'm not dying. Maybe, you know, maybe that's not enough for me to care about, to write about, whatever. And the reality is, we know suffering is not a contest. The reality is that is something I am Asked to carry right now. I don't know why I hate it. I think about it constantly. But when I wrote counterweights, I wanted to write super honestly to the point of maybe being kind of weird and quirky sometimes. These are my weights. These are my counterweights, because that is what this practice is.
- [07:24]
A
Yeah. And it. I think what it causes you to consider is because you brought up, you know, like, oh, have a gratitude journal. List three things at the end of the day that you're grateful for. But if you are going through a time period where the grief bucket, you know, the hardship bucket is incredibly heavy, then your three things at night might not be enough.
- [07:46]
B
Right.
- [07:46]
A
It doesn't counter the weight.
- [07:48]
B
It doesn't. We can only counter what we are willing to weigh. And so I am saying, whether you do it, I do it all throughout the day. It's just a part of my life now. It's. It's kind of bled in even to my. To my. In real life friendships. People around me are casually mentioning to me their counterweights, which I love. It's just a really. It's a sticky word that we can envision. And it's. It makes it. Once we name it, once we've given it that name, it's so much easier to reach for it. And so that is happening. What I'm saying is, sure, go ahead and write your gratitudes, your blessings, your counterweights, but also jot down the things that are weighing you down, because there's power in naming those things, too, and giving them all our sacred attention and acknowledging these are the things that. That make up my life right now, today. This is what I've been given. So make a list of both.
- [08:43]
A
Yeah. Okay. So going with the leg example, which was in just, you know, it's a story. What's interesting about the story? There's a lot of things that are interesting about the story, but I think it makes you think about the things in life when you're just going along with your daily business and something happens that's really unexpected. So you say you're. You're a cook at a community kitchen. The window, one of your happiest places. You say, when my life changed forever, something fell on my foot, like, oh, no big deal. But still, this has caused this mysterious condition. And you say, I exist on two separate planes. In one, everything is normal as long as I wear long pants. And on the other, something is obviously wrong. And you wrote, I was fracturing and almost no one knew. So you're talking in this One. And maybe you could explain it in the framework of counterweights. But you're talking in this one about how everyone that you talk to, these experts are like, well, what's causing this? It's mysterious. We can't figure it out. And finally someone says, well, just try and get your swelling down.
- [09:46]
B
Yes. I mean, can you. Can you believe it? I can't. Just hearing you retell that story to me is taking me back to that time. Yeah. This random thing happened. I kept working. I mean, it's like, it hurt. It hurts when we drop something on our foot. We've probably all done that. I thought nothing of it. It hurt. I got back to work. I did the business of the day. I noticed that my foot was bruised, which made sense. It started to swell, which made sense. But then it just kept swelling. Like, the bruise went away, and the swelling was getting worse. And I almost. I was, like, weirdly reluctant to really acknowledge what was happening. I was trying to ignore my way back to a normal that did not exist for me anymore. And so I just kept telling myself, like, it doesn't hurt. Everything's fine. Everything's fine, Everything's fine. You know, like I said, just wear long pants. Because at a certain point that summer, it was summertime, people started to notice. And I remember one night, I went to dinner with a group of friends that I don't see super often, and I had on, you know, like, cropped jeans and sandals. And at the end of dinner, we're walking back to the car, and it was a woman and a man. And the. The man, like, stops and just stares at my foot, like, the thing I didn't want anybody to do. And he's like, what is happening? Like, this is not normal. Because we had gone through the whole dinner, I hadn't mentioned anything. I mean, that's what I was doing. I was just like, if I ignore this, everybody will ignore this. But at certain points, we cannot ignore our way out of the pain. And so, yes, various doctors, various experts, like, that became my life for a while. And finally, one person, it wasn't even a doctor that I was actually seeing. It was just like a friend's husband who is a physician said, I cannot believe nobody is trying to reduce your swelling. And when he said that, I was like, oh, my gosh, nobody has ever even mentioned that. The. The experts were so fixated on figuring out what caused this mysterious thing that nobody was trying to actually help me feel better in the short term.
- [11:51]
A
Yeah.
- [11:51]
B
And so that led me to the path of Understanding It's a complicated medical thing. It's because of a lot of different reasons that converged in sort of what we would call a perfect, slash, terrible storm. This is part of my life now, but my only symptom really, is the swelling. And so that's kind of the epicenter of the thing for me. You know, it's always going to be a little swollen, but it's way better than it was before. People were trying to actually help me control that swelling. And so that became the whole. The whole journey was like, acceptance. This is part of my life now. This is something I've been asked to carry, but also there. There can be some relief in this. Right. And the journey of acceptance brought me into. In a lot of ways, and then a lot of other stories throughout the book. But for. To keep it to this leg story, I had to grieve it. And I. And through that process of acceptance and grieving, I came to see that the counterweight to loss is grief. So we think of grief as, like, this horrible thing that happens to us. The grief is not the horrible thing. The grief is. Is our healthy way of responding to the thing, to the loss. And our grief is what helps us to move through it so that we can carry on. Ah.
- [13:11]
A
Wow. And then you talked about this woman, Carol, who helped you. And then you have this beautiful. There's all these beautiful. I don't know what they call them call outs. They're like little extra sections in the book. And you have a baker's dozen blessing for Carol. I read this book recently called hold onto your kids by a man named Dr. Gordon Neufeld. And then this other woman, like, who trained with him, named Deborah McNamara, and she has a book called Rest, play, grow about raising toddlers, basically. Anyway, they both use this phrase called tears of futility. And I was like, oh, this is kind of my new favorite phrase. Basically, what they're saying is at some point, you. It's. And they're talking about it for toddlers. But I was like, yeah. Oh, I really relate that there's so many things in life that you don't have control over, and so you have to learn how to cry tears of futility. It's not going to change.
- [14:02]
B
I love that. Right?
- [14:03]
A
I loved it.
- [14:05]
B
It's. It's like surrender.
- [14:06]
A
Yeah. Like a toddler, like, they can't control everything. You know, things are constantly happening that they don't want to happen. They wish they could do more. They wish they were taller. You know, they wish they had. You know, they could eat the cookies. Whatever the thing was, it was so. There was actually so many instances where they. And it was like, you have to guide your child through learning that there are parts of life that you can't change. And so you cry tears of futility.
- [14:30]
B
Yes.
- [14:31]
A
And that's kind of the end. You. You.
- [14:33]
B
Yeah. So I carry on. Yeah.
- [14:36]
A
Grief is not the crisis. It is our response to the crisis. We cannot heal what we won't grieve. So that's one of the examples of counterweights that's in the book. When I was a kid, my grandpa had a room where he took apart all sorts of electronics. Seeing all the parts everywhere is so exciting. Today, as a parent trying to raise kids in a world of screens, I think about how exciting hands on learning can be. It can feel exhausting trying more compelling than a device. That is why Kiwico has been such a gift. We chose one of their science and engineering crates and the projects we build together turned our kitchen table into a mini innovation lab. There were moments of frustration and that's actually what I love most. My child had to think, adjust, try again. And when it finally clicked, pure pride. It felt different from other activities because it wasn't passive. It required creativity and persistence. And I didn't have to do research, source supplies or plan a thing. It just arrived at our door, ready to go. Kiwico makes it easy to build skills over time. Robotics, engineering, art, techniques, all while kids are having fun and there's no commitment. So you can pause or cancel anytime. We're already looking forward to our next crate. I love giving my kids opportunities to discover what they're capable of. And honestly, these make incredible gifts too. Tinker, create and innovate with Kiwico. Get up to 50 off your first monthly crate at kiwico.com code 1000hours. That's up to 50 off your first crate at K-I W I C O.com K code 1000hours. PandaCrate is an exception. C site for details this episode is sponsored by Better Help. March gives us International Women's Day, a chance to celebrate women and all they carry. And when I think about that, I think about so many great moms I have known. Their steady presence, the invisible work they do, the way they hold so much together without asking for applause. As a kid, you don't fully see it. As an adult, you absolutely do. Women carry so much at work in relationships, in their homes, in their communities. The logistics, the emotional temperature of the room, the unseen responsibilities that just live in their minds and often their own emotional well being gets pushed to the bottom of the list. Therapy can be a space where women don't have to carry at all, a place to untangle expectations, set healthy boundaries and say out loud what feels heavy. That kind of space matters. Better help makes that support accessible. Their therapists are fully licensed in the US and follow a strict code of conduct. They match you with a therapist based on a short questionnaire and if it's not the that, you can switch anytime. With over 30,000 therapists and more than 6 million people served globally and an average of 4.9 out of 5 star ratings across 1.7 million reviews, it is clear this kind of support works. Your emotional well being matters. Find support and feel lighter in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off@betterhelp.com 1000 hours that's B T T R H lp.com 1000 hours these days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's just not worth it to me. That's exactly why I love Quince. The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like 100 European linen, 100 silk and organic cotton poplin. Their lightweight cotton cashmere sweaters are perfect for the changing seasons and I'm loving the seasonal colors and prints for spring. These are versatile, well made pieces and that make getting dressed simple and I appreciate how they do business. Quint works directly with safe ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen. You're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores, just quality clothing. The difference is in the details. The linen is breathable but substantial. The cotton poplin is crisp and holds its shape. Everything is built to hold up season after season, including the stitching, the fit and the fabrics. These are pieces you'll reach for over and over. That Quint cotton cashmere sweater has become my go to. It's light enough for layering but still feels lux. And it didn't cost what I thought quality cashmere would. Stop waiting to build the wardrobe you actually want. You don't need a closet full of options. You need pieces that work. Go to quint.com outside for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to q-I n c.com outside for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quinn's.com outside. You talk in this book so much about nature.
- [18:50]
B
I do.
- [18:52]
A
So much. So since we're in Michigan, I would love if you would talk about your 25th one hour anniversary trip. It was your 25th anniversary with Corey to Michigan and it was like a couple hours.
- [19:06]
B
Right? I mean, you know, I opened up that chapter. The chapters are all really short, which is. That's the kind of book I prefer to read. So that's the book I wrote. But I'm talking about, you know, I feel I. I have this sense and I think a lot of us have this sense that like everybody else is doing everything better than I am, including celebrating their anniversaries. Like we just are kind of haphazard. We love each other very much, but we are not like, we are not cute like that. And so, you know, I'm talking about one of my dearest friends upgraded her her wedding ring and it's gorgeous. Like my own very practical parents who never went anywhere went to Hawaii for their 25th anniversary. It's like the only place they ever went that I can remember. Corey and I had like a handful of hours and we drove up to New Buffalo, Michigan and it was like time bound. We are on a schedule. We had to get back to town to take our 16 year old to do his driver's test. Like this is just life. And so yes, we, we fled an hour north and we sat on the beach and I picked around for sea glass while Corey I think took a nap under his. Under his beach umbrella. Like we weren't, you know, we, it was too chilly to swim. It's just we went there as like our version of we're going to mark this moment. We're going to do something outside of our routine. It is not fancy, it's not expensive. It's attainable to us right now. And this is gonna have to cut it. And it did. It did. Yeah.
- [20:36]
A
Oh, and I loved it. And you said, so you're looking for sea glass you found like this is a place where you can find it. And you wrote sea glass without time and grit is just someone's old beer. They say it takes anywhere from 20 to 200 years for a broken bottle to achieve sea glass status. And so then you had this whole list of. It was a beautiful list of things that improve with time. I loved all of those little extra sections.
- [21:01]
B
Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad.
- [21:03]
A
Was that something that you kind of knew from the beginning you were gonna do or did okay?
- [21:07]
B
I kind of Knew, I mean, I knew, you know, this is a, this is a, a paperback book. This is not like a fancy hardback book with photos and blah, blah, blah, blah. I think books like that are amazing, but that's not the book that I was writing. But I started to feel like, well, but what if we did do like some different kinds of things in this more traditional paperback book? And my publisher agreed. So I knew what I knew was going in. I didn't know how many chapters it was going to end up being. I didn't know how many, you know, weights and counterweights I would end up writing about. But I wanted, after every chapter I wanted there to be a counterweight. And so that's what those little, like. Because I write about some heavy things. There are some heavy things happening in my life and around me and I write pretty honestly about them. So I wanted, and I, I also wrote about a lot of really light hearted things, but I wanted after each chapter to have this moment of a couple things. It was showing the work. Part of the work of counterweights is knowing ourselves. And a lot of us don't. We don't know what we like. We don't feel like we really are allowed to want things or to long for things or to have favorite things. Like we get real stuck in that. And so I wanted to offer these little glimpses of like things that I love, books that I've read, movies that I like, you know, these, these ideas of like, as we do the work of understanding ourselves, then we are more able to find, to locate our counterweights within our everyday life and world. But I also wanted it to be for the reader like just a chance to like take a breath and have some fun. And you know, I don't explicitly say in the book make these lists yourself, but I think that's something that readers can certainly do is kind of take my example of, you know, I listed things that get better with time. Like what do you think are things that get better with time? It's really fun work to do.
- [23:06]
A
Yeah. Yeah. What are my favorite novels? What are my favorite movies that I've seen recently? And then I love this part about you collect. You collect the little bits of nature. Can you talk about your jars, your time capsules for the seasons?
- [23:18]
B
I can. You'll see behind me right there is the My Shadow Box. So that's it. It's kind of. You can't see what's in it right now, but there's stuff in it. I am a magpie forevermore. I don't. I think I was probably this way even as a kid. I mean, I love your work, Jenny, and, like, helping us understand the value of letting childhood exist outdoors to the extent that we are able to. And, you know, I am almost 50 years old. The Internet, obviously, was not a thing when I was a kid, but I grew up on this little piece of country land. And I remember. I have clear memories of when the trees would bud out in spring. I would pick the little flowers and make potpourri or, like, dump water and random things from the bathroom in and try to make perfume. I was always kind of into that sort of tactile enjoying nature thing from a very young age. And then I got away from it. As we often do, we. We let. We let life grow us up too much, grow us out of the. The callings of our inner child that are so desperately trying to show us what we love and how we interact with the world. And so at some point, probably since I've lived here in this home, which was a really pivotal moment for our family moving here, but 15 years ago, I started to. You know, here we're in the city for the first time. I was not living out in the country. Life looks different here. Beauty in some ways, looks different here. And so I found myself just starting to. You know, when we would go on walks, I would see a cool rock or I would see a pretty leaf or whatever the case may be. And I was just trying to, like. It's almost like I was doing it without really understanding it. And as I've picked it apart, as I. As a writer does, I think I'm trying to just hold on to a moment, like, a moment of rest, of beauty, of delight, of peace, and bring part of that moment home with me. But what happened was I was like. I lived in a house with, you know, kids who. Which. My kids did this, too. Kids who have desk drawers full of rocks and dirt and twigs. And that's kind of what I was doing as a. As the moment. And my kids were starting to be like, why is this stick here? Is this trash? Are you keeping this? So I ended up finding a little shadow box from a thrift store, and I started to place my little treasures into that box. And then at the end of every season, I pack them into a glass jar, and I put a picture of one of those jars in the book.
- [25:47]
A
Yep.
- [25:47]
B
So you can see, like, what my little time capsule of that season looks like. Like. And it's become. I mean, I just kind of fell into doing this. But it's my favorite thing now. It's just. It's like a little visual time capsule of my life and. And my life through the seasons.
- [26:04]
A
Oh, I love it. Yeah. Fall 2024.
- [26:07]
B
Look at that.
- [26:08]
A
You know, isn't it interesting? I talked to this woman, her name's Aaron Lynem, and she has a podcast called Nat Theo. It's about, like, the theology of nature. It's for kids. And my daughter loves it. My nine year old daughter loves it. Like, what about the hummingbird? And, um, I mean, she goes to like all sorts of different animals. And she talked about. And I've never considered this, Shannon, about how God made all these sensory experiences in part to help trigger our memories. Long before people had an iPhone where you could videotape everything, or Google Glass, you know, where you can just, whatever, record.
- [26:41]
B
Yeah.
- [26:42]
A
Long before that. And so you have these little beautiful bits of nature that serve as memory triggers. I want to read what you wrote. It's so beautiful. I never feel more loved then when my family enables my endless pursuit of living as a magpie intent on collecting Earth's gifts they've come to expect my trailing a few paces behind, bending down or reaching up for nature's runoff. And you say some might call it clutter. I call it evidence. I was here, I am here. And I love that. Gives a permission. I think all of it gives permission. You know, you're talking about the list. And then someone would think, oh, well, I could do that. And we often think of these collecting, like you said, for children, there's racks in their pockets. You know, there's racks in their desk drawer, but for adults to do as well. So a lot about nature in here always. You know, the Midwestern summers, the skies, the fig trees. A lot in here. You say my body instinctively led me outside where values take root. You talk about spring. Spring comes late to Goshen, but it plays for keeps. Just a lot there about nature and a lot in this one about church.
- [27:48]
B
Yeah. So the good, the good, the bad and the ugly. In my. In my case, we got kicked out of church. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I know it's such a common story.
- [27:59]
A
Yeah.
- [27:59]
B
Yeah. I mean, it's. It's more relatable than I wish it would be. And to be very honest, I foolishly never imagined that it would happen to. To us. You know, I saw it happening around and I. And I empathized and I believed it and I felt it, and I just felt. I didn't even think about it. I just I sort of felt like, well, you know, that's awful and it's, it's terrible that the church has become so harmful and painful to so many people. But I never imagined it happening to us in our church that had been our home for, you know, 13 years. It was a huge part of our life. There was so much good that had come out of it. And it shaped me and really, it shaped me, my kids, my family, and really meaningful ways that we, we hold on to even now. But yeah, that, that experience was extremely painful. That's one of the hardest seasons of our life. And in our marriage even, I mean, it just took a toll. It was devastating. It was devastating.
- [29:00]
A
Yeah, I related to a lot of it. The fallout, the ramifications, and the sort of, I guess, like to the point of the swollen leg. Like, there's way worse things. People die. You know, people are in horrible, you know, just horrible situations. So you tend to sort of gloss over. But I mean, it. We had our kids the other day. They. Okay, I learned about this thing. It's called the fast friends questions. Have you heard of it? It's like, no. 36 questions. Someone did a study on how quickly can you build a relationship? And so they came up with these 36 open ended questions and had strangers come together for 45 minutes and banter back and forth with these open ended questions. One of them is like, do you have any premonitions on how you, how you will die? I mean, that's like more toward the end of the list, but, you know, what are the qualities you like in a friend? And anyway, it was like, it was so powerful that the people who didn't know each other's names or they knew each other's names but like, didn't have each other's contact information, they just came in as strangers, sought each other out. Like, a huge portion of the people sought each other out based on the details that they Learned in that 45 minutes. And two of the people actually got married. So anyway, it's pretty cool. It's called the best friends questions or something. So we've been doing them with our kids. You know, there's 36 of them. And one of them we just did last week, which was try and give your life story in four minutes or less. And the kids are, they're still kids, but for every single one of them, this was the central thing. Being kicked out of church, being ostracized, heartbreaking. Losing community. No one checks in on you. And in our case, there was a pedophile as the youth pastor.
- [30:41]
B
Yeah.
- [30:41]
A
And we had sent in letters of concern, and that's why we got kicked out. And they said we were gossips, and they said we were stretching the fabric of their community was so nasty, they kicked us out through certified letter in the mail. And then when it finally came to light that the guy was a pedophile and was like the same year, six months later, six or seven months, we went in to see how they would announce it to the church. We tried to watch the online service, but they didn't put it in there. And they had us escorted out by the sheriff.
- [31:09]
B
I am zero percent surprised. I am so, so sorry. And so much of what you just said almost completely mirrors our situation with our church. It is just all too common of a story. And I remember. I remember telling Corey, you know, this happened a couple of years ago for us. And so my kids at that point, you know, we had one in college, two in high school. I mean, they were older, but I just remember thinking, like, panicking, like, we're getting to the end of our time with them here at our home, and this is what they're going to remember. They're going to remember their. Yeah, their dad and their mom just being stressed to the max, crying, fighting with people, you know, beating back false accusations, being called names, like you said, being ostracized. Like, I just. I so desperately wanted to just put that bucket down and. And carry on with my life. And yet I couldn't. I mean, I was just. It was a bucket I was forced to carry. And so we had to do our very best to find ways to stay whole and human and connected to each other, connected to God, to help our kids process whatever they were processing. We were just forced into it. And like you said, I mean, are there worse things that happen? Yes. I mean, you know, people suffer all kinds of horrible things. Relationships and divorce happens. Like, all these things that we just. We wouldn't have picked, but for us, it was catastrophic. And we survived it. And we continue to heal. We continue to move forward in hope. And it's also still painful.
- [32:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. You've talked about the part of the counterweight here was Taylor Swift.
- [32:47]
B
It's true. I. And I know, like, you know, I know we're not all swifties. I mean, I don't find your thing. But for us, it was so shocking, Jenny, because I had been, like, a very low level. I wouldn't have even called myself a swifty. But, like, I liked some of her music and I was liking it increasingly, you Know, I was learning it a little bit more, but when my husband, like my burly, bearded jail chaplain husband, started to. To really key into Taylor Swift music, I was kind of like, what is happening? This is so unexpected. And I believe in my. In my true heart, this was God's gift to us because it gave us. It's so weird to say it gave us, like, this uniting, this united project where we were like, okay, we're just gonna go all in on Taylor Swift. We're gonna listen to all of her music. We're gonna listen to podcasts about her music. We're gonna pick it apart and figure it out. And so it was this big, you know, this big, like, fake academic endeavor of pop culture, but it took a lot of time and intention. And when we were doing our Taylor Swift homework, it was giving our brains a break from. From the terror. Right. Of this church stuff. It was giving Corey and I something new to talk about because we were just in that position where it overtook our lives, it overtook our conversation. It just gave us a beat to catch our breath, to have some fun, to connect in a way that we had never connected before. And in so many ways during that particular season, it saved our lives, as random as that might sound.
- [34:27]
A
I love it. I love it because it's so heavy. You write things like this. Maybe the next time we spoke from the heart, we would be heard. Maybe if we tried a different angle, our words would fall into place. Maybe if we stayed calm enough, persistent enough, they would understand, you say, understand why survivors of abuse often avoid seeking accountability, intent, institutional or otherwise. In the end, it's your throat that's left raw and aching, your nervous system that's abandoned, on high alert. You talked about, which exile did you prefer? And you had this quote from Emily Freeman that said, we were leaving, but we felt left.
- [35:05]
B
Yeah, that makes me cry.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah, Relatable. You know, you're like, this is the 13 years, and you can't. You can't remake it. You know, when you talk about, like, the buckets that you carry, and like, you. You cannot. 13 years, the years that your children are growing up, they're born. You know, the. Those times, and you're throwing showers for this person's kid. And, like, you cannot. And that's something that we've been learning with our own kids, is like, we're not ever going to have that exact same community again. And I don't. I mean, I believe in God's redemption. And actually, we've made some other really beautiful friends that, you know, Then you're like, oh, gosh, I wouldn't know this person otherwise. But yeah, so. So the point with the Taylor Swift, it's like, I mean, this is so heavy. And yet then you bring in this other part that's really light. And I interviewed this man. His name's Adam Lane Smith. He talks about attachment, family counseling. Anyway, I learned about this chemical that I never heard of, Shannon, called vasopressin. And it's a chemical that's released when you are on mission together. Like, on a mission. And I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. Like, sometimes when something seems so awful like you. Like you said, this was really hard. This is your 25th year of marriage. You know, it's supposed to be like, when everyone goes to Hawaii and. And gets their. Get their new jewelry, and you're spending two hours getting sea glass in Buffalo, in New Buffalo. And you're also like, this is a really hard year of marriage because we're mired in the fallout from losing our church. Husband goes back to therapy. You. There was something else you read that I thought was so deep. You say, let me find it. Oh, I. I really want to find it. It was about Corey. And you said, as our spiritual home went up in flames, I watched parts of my husband incinerate. The battle overtook our lives. And so the counterweight, it's a great picture because you're like, who would have thought, Taylor Swift? But it does go to show you that you come together and you focus. You pick up a different bucket and you hold it at the same time, and it can help you to get through.
- [37:15]
B
Yeah.
- [37:17]
A
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- [41:02]
B
Yeah. So Holy alliance is. I've mentioned my husband Corey is a chaplain at the Elkhart County Jail, second largest jail in Indiana. It's a massive place, unfortunately, that it's not a point of pride to have an enormous jail. But that is his, that's his full time work. And so in the aftermath of losing our church, we sort of in some ways fell into. We were already like jail ministry and incarcerated people are just interwoven into the fabric of our life and have been for a long, long time. So just a really important and meaningful part of our community. It's a community that we have learned so much from and we consider them in so many ways, like our pastors and our guides. Right. So the, the community itself was not new, that group of people, but we sort of fell into leading a Sunday morning gathering. We do not call it a church. Some people kind of do, we don't. But it's a Sunday morning gathering of people from work release. So at this point we're up to like a hundred people from work release, which is right in our neighborhood, which is like an incarceration facility for people who can go to work in church and some things like that. And so we meet early Sunday mornings for an hour. We call ourselves the Holy alliance because, you know, we are set apart and we are for each other and with each other. We are an alliance, a family together. And we just so desperately, we ourselves want and need that belonging. We believe we all want and need that belonging. And so that became this like this little shoot of new green growth on the grave of something devastating, you know. And it happened, it happened around that time and has become so redemptive and healing and such a source of light and life for us.
- [42:57]
A
Ah. I guess it's kind of similar, right? It's like, it's not the same. These aren't people that were with your kids when they grew up and that, you know, saw your kids playing the. In the church performance, you know, and in all those years. But it is something new. Our. Our middle daughter is a singer, and she. She's in middle school, but she sang. She got to sing the Star Spangled Banner at this, like, homecoming basketball game, and it was packed, and she really, like, nailed it. She's pretty good. No one else in our family can sing. Everyone so jealous. What the heck? Anyway, so she nailed it, and she had some friends there, and she just. I mean, she broke down sobbing, and she said later, she said, mom, she said, a year ago, I had no friends.
- [43:42]
B
Oh.
- [43:44]
A
But you know, then in some ways, you're like, well, she did experience God's redemption, you know, and that's right.
- [43:50]
B
She learned something through that. Yeah.
- [43:52]
A
So I wanted to read a couple of. Oh, go ahead, you go.
- [43:55]
B
Oh, well, no, I was just gonna say before you read, I can't wait to hear what you're about to read. This past Sunday at Holy alliance, our daughter Ruby, who's 19, she's our only daughter, she's getting ready to move far away, like 600 miles away, the end of this week. And so because all of these folks are incarcerated, there are always people leaving, getting out of work, release. It's like a positive thing. But we're always sad to lose them. They go back to their lives, wherever they are. Some of them are able to stick around, and they're always new people coming in. So it's a. It's a community of people that's always churning, like, in flux. So we. We designate a few minutes every Sunday to read a blessing over whoever is graduating or moving on. And so this past Sunday, Ruby agreed. She's very shy, but she said she did want to come forward for the blessing. And when Corey, you know, there were a couple other folks who were getting out of work release, that came up. And then he said, my daughter Ruby is getting ready to move away and watching especially the women get up, because it's like, if you want to come up and, like, put your arms around people, you know, while we pray for them. So many of these adult women who don't really know Ruby super well. Right. But they've been in Holy alliance with her for however long they've been there. And this is what a community does for each other. And so just Watching my daughter, my young daughter, who's been shaped in ways she probably can't quite identify yet, but I know that this is shaping all of us in different ways. And to watch these women who so much of society would judge or, you know, denigrate or, you know, try to keep their children from people who are incarcerated, watching them put their arms around my daughter was just beyond. Wow.
- [45:37]
A
And you're in this community of. Of people who are going out and doing something new, or, you know, like you said, in some ways going back maybe to what they were doing, but this community of people who are used to being influx, and so then they know how to pray for her and how to come around her.
- [45:55]
B
Right.
- [45:55]
A
How to support her in that time.
- [45:57]
B
Yep.
- [45:58]
A
Wow. These are hard things are. One of our kids really struggles with trust. She's like, I. I mean, I thought these people were my friends. And like, we're. All of a sudden, we're not at church anymore, and no one reaches out and says, how are you? Where have you been? We got escorted out by the police. And these people. That kids have been in our home, that we've coached their kids sports. No one's like, how are you? What. What's happening? What's going on? It's just. It's her. It's kind of horrific, really.
- [46:27]
B
Yeah, it really is.
- [46:29]
A
It's the wolves that eat the sheep. I read a lot of books about it now at this point.
- [46:32]
B
Right. I read that book too.
- [46:34]
A
Yeah. Yeah. But you say, what does it really mean for a church to be safe? Safe for whom? So if you're going through that, a situation like that or something that's just really heavy, then, you know, it might be Taylor Swift. Right.
- [46:48]
B
I. I might. My hope is that when people were reading that chapter in particular, it was. It's one of the heavier chapters that I wrote, but I imagine most people did not see Taylor Swift coming, and that's just the way it happened. Right. I was just writing down what happened, but I got a little, like, a little kick out of knowing that people are going to be like, wait, what? How did we go from this to Taylor Swift on one page? So, yeah, I love. I love that you pointed it out.
- [47:13]
A
What it does is it makes you realize, like, okay, this is really heavy. Whatever the thing is, you're listening in, whatever the thing is right now that you're holding in your left arm that's so heavy, and you think, oh, gosh, I have to find something, you know, equally as big that's going to counter this out and it's just whatever you can find that brings you joy. So you had examples from the Holy alliance, their counterweights, and I just wanted to read, need two of them. Cardio mixed with worship music and peppermint essential oils from Adam. So there we go. You know, I love it. That's a simple thing, but it really can. And to your point, these are people who are, you know, are. Have had, I would imagine, just the hardest of the hard pasts, you know.
- [47:53]
B
That's right.
- [47:53]
A
Can't even, probably even imagine. And then the situation that they're in now where they're really trying to come out of it and change their life. And they're going to say, cardio mixed with worship music and peppermint essential oil. And then there was this one from Micah. I am a door dasher, and I look forward to the interactions with the customers, retailers, and other people I meet in the restaurants and stores. Many just need one encouraging word or smile to help them out a little. I enjoy this.
- [48:19]
B
That would make me cry when I first read. I mean, what I wanted. It's not that I wanted. It's that I know deep in my bones the counterweights are accessible to everyone. This is not about being bougie or having privilege or wealth. I mean, some of the things I wrote about. Yeah, I mean, some of them, like, I wrote about traveling, and that requires some amount of privilege and money and all of those things. But at its core, counterweights are available and accessible to everyone. And so when I. When I brought this concept to Holy alliance and I explained it in probably two minutes, and they like, instantly they got it. And so I passed out these papers, like, if you want to write down one of your counterweights, you know, write it down here, sign your name so I can print it. And the stuff that they instantly, it's like, these are really small things. Several people mentioned a cold pop we are here in the Midwest we call soda pop. And several people are like, a cold pop is a counterweight. It's like something easy that I can reach for, and it fills that good bucket just a little bit. It lifts me up just a little bit off the ground. Because this was never about achieving balance. It was never about, like, can a Taylor Swift song counterbalance this devastation from losing our church? Of course not. That's not how this works. It's not about, like, you know, this cancels out this and whatever. It's not how life works, but it's about finding these little things that can lift us a little further. Off the ground so that we can carry on. And they instantly got it. And their answers just blew me away.
- [49:56]
A
Yeah. Yes. And I love the variety. Some of them are about relationships, like my kids, my grandkids. Some of them are about. A lot of them are about music, movement, and then a lot of them are about work. So this. I mean, this guy's saying, I'm a doordasher, and I learned about DoorDash probably 18 months ago, and I was like, this is an incredible invention. What? You know, we were at a hotel, and I was there with, like, some of my kids. My husband was somewhere else. We didn't have a car. Like, how are we supposed to get food? And so I downloaded that doordash app, and I was like, this is a miracle. It is a game changer. Yes. You can get anything.
- [50:34]
B
Yeah.
- [50:35]
A
And so I do feel like often, probably when the door dash person shows up, you're dealing with a person who is, like, so thankful.
- [50:44]
B
Right.
- [50:45]
A
Like, I am filled with gratitude because otherwise, we wouldn't have eaten in my children, you know? So I love that. It was such a good. A beautiful mix of these. Of these counterweights and in such simple things. Sunshine on my face. Everything from that to music. And the ideas just remind you that art or feeding people good food or someone wrote Mexican food. That these small things really can make a difference when you're in the hardest of the hardest situations. I love the book, Shannon. I love it.
- [51:13]
B
I'm so honored.
- [51:16]
A
You use the word soul nourishing. And I was like, I can't remember what it was related to, but the phrase soul nourishing came up, and I was like, that's. That's how I feel about this book. It's soul nourishing. I love the. I love the picture of the tree that you talked about, and you said writing the book was soul nourishing. And I felt like reading the book was so nursing.
- [51:36]
B
Oh, I'm so. That means so much.
- [51:39]
A
I loved it. All right, let's wrap it up. So this is out now. If you want to grab a copy. It is called counterweights. An essential practice for holding hope in the heavy world. Let's hit one more topic. Hot mess fatality.
- [51:50]
B
You're the first person to ask me about hot messality. I'm so glad.
- [51:54]
A
Well, you say it's one of your greatest counterweights, your imperfect home.
- [51:59]
B
Yeah, it is. I mean, home for me. I'm a person who. I am an introvert. I. I love to be cozy.
- [52:07]
A
Wow.
- [52:08]
B
I love to. I know that's interesting to me because
- [52:10]
A
you do so much with people.
- [52:13]
B
I do. And, and that's maybe even all the more reason why I just love my home. My husband, Corey, we've kind of switched roles, and it's very interesting to me. He used to be like, we were both introverted, but he was almost like 100 introverted and I was a little more middle. I'm becoming more introverted. Although, you know, I have public. I do public work and I do people work, and I love both. Yeah, Corey's becoming more extrovert. And so when he gets a free evening, he's like, let's walk into town, you know, let's see who we see. And let's. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, all I want to do is just be here in my home and be cozy and watch my show or read my book or putter around the kitchen or whatever. We're just all different. But yes, I. I have learned in large part thanks to my neighbors who have invited me into their. Into their homes, into their spaces, into their, you know, I wrote about. And maybe. I don't know if it was Ministry of Ordinary Places or start with hello, but I've been invited in to have tea with a person who did not have a table. Like, so many of the people around us are just. Their lives are different. They are struggling in different ways. And yet I have received the truest hospitality from some of them. And that in and of itself has allowed me to really reconsider what hospitality looks like and, and what I want my home to be. You know, we're so long. For so long. It was like, you know, I get into decorating and I love to cook and, you know, all these kinds of things. But if we're not careful, we can find ourselves in situations where, like, nobody's allowed in our home unless everything is perfect, which is, for me, never. So if I understand the value of inviting people into my space, which is. It's not always easy for me to do, but it is always rewarding. And so as I practice doing that, I learn more and more. Like, even if it's not my first instinct to be like, yeah, come on in, or come on over on short notice, I'm always going to be so glad I did. And so it just, it brought that bar, that expectation that I put on myself down. And I think that, like, when we can get to, like, low bar hospitality, which I call hot messpitality, like, that's where. That's where the good stuff is. Because Then it, whoever is in our imperfect space suddenly realizes like, oh wait, we're doing this. Like we're just, we're just being together as we are, as our homes are. Like, I can do that. And that is where I want to. That's where I want to kind of make my home.
- [54:49]
A
Oh, I loved the ideas. Come on Christmas day. There will be snacks and a puzzle.
- [54:57]
B
Yeah, it's not super excited, but I love puzzles.
- [55:01]
A
You know, you sit around, try and find the pieces. Vasopressin. You know, you have a common mission.
- [55:06]
B
That's right.
- [55:07]
A
Talk about things. Come for Easter lunch. There will be store bought pie served on paper plates. You say Easter. If we hope to live a good life of contentment, we have to exit the trap of comparing ourselves only to those who have more than we do and learn from those who have less. Uncomfortable as that might be. My imperfect home is among my greatest counterweights. Bring what you have is always an adventure and a feast. What a book. What a book. We didn't cover a lot. There's.
- [55:37]
B
I know there's a. There's a lot in this.
- [55:39]
A
There's a lot in here. You talk about three. You talk about when you were rude to the Kroger lady and you say the way we treat those in our peripheral vision matters. That's a beautiful story. I loved reading about that. And you, I mean, there's so much in here. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Huge congrats to you.
- [55:55]
B
Thank you so much.
- [55:57]
A
This is book four. So can you tell people about the other books as well as your substack and your free counter weeks? Counterweights? Am I even talking counterweights weekly?
- [56:07]
B
It's a mouthful. It's a mouthful. Yes, I would love to. My first book is titled Falling Free, Rescued from the Life I Always Wanted. And that tells the story that I hinted at somewhere in this conversation about when my husband and I and our young kids at the time moved from that picture perfect storybook country living into this neighborhood. Next came the Ministry of Ordinary Places. And that book tells the story of like, oh wow, we're in a very different place. And it's going to change everything about our lives. And so it's, it's sort of about like looking around us in our ordinary lives and, and letting the people around us kind of change us, letting ourselves be changed by that. The. All of my books are faith based. Start with hello came next. And that book is not like overtly faith based because we wanted that to be like. This is about how to live as neighbors together. And that's for everybody in a perfect world. That means people who believe very differently are, are living together and co. Coexisting together and supporting each other, loving each other as neighbors. And so that's, that's a little outside of my typical writing lane. I'm a storyteller by heart and by nature, I guess I should say. And, and that still has a lot of storytelling in it. But that book start with hello is the Little More. It's not a how to because you just. It doesn't work that way, but it's a little more instructional, I guess I would say, like very practical ways to, to learn to live as neighbors. And then Counterweights is number four. And Counterweights is sort of in the vein of Ministry of Ordinary Places, which, you know, it's these really short chapters. It's storytelling out of my, my personal, unique, wonderful, challenging life. But this one is unique too because like you said, it's got photos, it's got lists, it's got like fun little counterweights sprinkled throughout it.
- [58:01]
A
Yeah.
- [58:02]
B
And then. Okay, you said sub stack. I do have a sub stack. You can find it. It's called the Soup, but you can find it by just Googling. Shannon Martin Substack. It's a weekly substack where I write about a lot of these similar things. It's a best selling sub stack, so a lot of people are really enjoying it. And then I started in November, a separate thing called Counterweights Weekly and that is free for anyone who wants. It's not on Substack, but you can subscribe to all these things on my website. Counterweights Weekly is a short little weekly email. It goes out midweek Wednesdays, and in it I write a couple short little paragraphs about a political weight that I have noticed or that has weighed me down over the past week. And then a couple paragraphs about a counterweight that has helped to lift me back up.
- [58:48]
A
Oh, you offer so much. So much. I love. Start with hello. I just like pulled up my own notes. I'm. I. What did my notes say? And you know, I have, I wrote down I loved your writing. Like when you say we've been together for 13 years, faded by birth dates and zip codes and talking about the ease of childhood connections. I mean, not always, but sometimes, you know, if you grow up together. And then you talk about when you become an adult. You say forging new friendships in adulthood is a high stakes business business. No one teaches us that community has to be built with our hands and our tender hearts and our precious time. No one breaks it down and. And no one really talks about how. What to do when it's shattered.
- [59:27]
B
Right.
- [59:27]
A
You know. Right.
- [59:28]
B
Yeah.
- [59:29]
A
So the books go hand in hand, I think the counterweights. They do, you know.
- [59:33]
B
They do.
- [59:33]
A
Yeah.
- [59:33]
B
They work really well together and.
- [59:35]
A
Yeah.
- [59:36]
B
I mean, they're just. There's so much of. For me, it's kind of. It's fun to go back and see, like, you know, my kids. So my kids all came into our family through adoption. That's something a little bit unique about our family. But I write about, like, I. I can go back and. And read my books and. And watch my kids grow, watch our family grow and change our minds about some things and shift into new ways. I mean, this is what life is doing. If we are. If we are not changing, we are not to going growing. And so I. I love thinking of them kind of in sequence and how they just tell our story.
- [60:12]
A
Yeah. Yes. Huge congrats. Counterweights, an essential practice for holding hope in a heavy world. It's available wherever you buy your books. Shannon, thanks for being here again.
- [60:22]
B
I. It's my pleasure. I loved it.
- [60:26]
A
Spring break isn't what it used to be. It's better this spring. Stay three nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit Best Western.com for complete terms and conditions. I didn't expect this.
- [60:43]
B
TikTok has more short dramas than I could ever finish. Each episode leaves you wanting the next. Download TikTok now and try it.