Perhaps you are familiar with what a trellis is. It’s a ladder of sorts — a structure to support vines or shrubs as they grow upward in their endeavors to grow fruit.
I wonder, though, how many you’ve actually seen? You know… in person? I don’t feel like I have, other than a stack against a wall in the garden area at a home improvement store. Or, I’m taken back to the rows of mobile homes where my grandparents retired. I can picture broken, sometimes rotting, wooden structures climbing out of planters on the sides of mobile homes. Vines climbed their way up, sometimes fledgling, and sometimes flourishing.
Ancient monks and mystics sometimes used the imagery of a trellis when they described what is known as a rule of life. This was a system of habits, routines, and rhythms to put into practice as a structure…like a trellis. It helped them grow toward the most mature and healthy version of who they could be.
You already have a rule of life.
So, maybe you don’t have a rotting wooden ladder, but the hope of this website is to help you see that you have a trellis of your own. You have a structure that your life is built on, and it is guiding and forming who you are becoming.
You have a rule of life, whether spoken or unspoken, and it is shaping you and forming you into who you will be next year, and beyond. Trellis.life is an exploration of how to modify that rule of life to help you realize the fullness of who you were meant to be.
We hope you can join us in the weeks, months, and years to come. We are developing content that will be both practical and spiritual. There will be tools and practical resources like app and gear reviews. But there will also be broader reflections about how to use those tools to build meaningful rhythms that lead to a meaningful life.
The goal of each article is to help you consider what direction your own trellis — your set of habits and routines — is taking you. And while asking that question, to also offer some practical tools or ideas to help move you in the direction you want to go.
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About John Chandler
I am a spiritual director, podcaster, and a freelance WordPress developer.
I am also interested in finding meaningful ways of living outside of my work, which seems to include a lot of reading, watching baseball (Angels!) or football (Broncos!), playing board games, eating salsa, and wishing I was hiking more. Oh, and coffee.
I live on the desert edge of Phoenix with my wife and kids – with previous stops in Austin and outside Seattle as a grown-up, and SoCal and Colorado as a youngster.
You can find more of my meanderings on my micro.blog.
Photo by Roman Kraft