Aspire to live quietly
- Lisa Raie
- Mar 19
- 2 min read
“Aspire to live quietly…”
That line alone feels like an inheritance, doesn’t it?
Not a loud legacy, not one written in grand gestures, but one stitched, worked, and lived through hands that kept going. Through days that looked ordinary from the outside, yet carried immense weight, perseverance, and devotion within them.
It makes sense that it feels like it’s been delivered to me.
Because in many ways, it has.
Somewhere along the line,
motherhood was made to look loud.
Measured in milestones, spoken in achievements,
seen in all that can be counted and named.
But the women I come from, they lived differently.
I saw it again today, in a piece of art that felt less like something I found and more like something that found me.
A woman, head bowed, hands at work, surrounded by the quiet rhythm of tending.
And beside her, the words:
“Aspire to live quietly…”
And I knew.
This is how they lived.
This is how she lived ~ my 3x great grandmother, Mary Martha her sisters, her daughters perhaps.
Not loudly known, not widely seen, but deeply rooted in the sacred work of everyday life.
Hands that stitched, hands that prepared,
hands that held what needed holding without asking to be noticed.
Motherhood, as she lived it, was not something to perform.
It was something to become.
A quiet faithfulness.
A steady presence.
A life poured out in ways that left traces, not headlines.
And here I am now, years and generations later,
finding myself drawn to the same rhythm.
To thread patch fabric.
To sketchbook pages.
To words that arrive softly and settle gently.
I used to wonder if this way of living was too small.
But I see it now ~ this is inheritance.
Not written in documents, but carried in the body.
In the way my hands reach for making.
In the way my heart leans toward quiet.
Motherhood is not only in raising children.
It is in how we tend to life itself.
How we hold space.
How we create.
How we continue.
And maybe the truest measure of a life is not in how loudly it is seen, but in how deeply it is lived.
So I will keep going, in this quiet way.
Working with my hands.
Tending what is mine to tend.
Trusting that even here, especially here something sacred is being carried forward.
Just as it always has been.
🎨 🪡
Holy farkkkk Lise the way you write makes me cry everyday (crying for good) and these words “motherhood is not only in raising children. It is in how we tend to life itself.” These words are going to stay with me and help me be better as a mother as a wife as a woman living life as only I can