About Nancy Steinhausen
I believe the world gets mended in small, faithful ways — and every week in Oikosophia, she writes about what that actually looks like in an ordinary life. She is a reader, a recovering coach, and a deeply devoted hermit who finds beauty in the kind of attention most people rush past. Your support means she gets to keep doing the thing she loves most: sitting quietly with ideas and sending them out into the world.
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"Attention is the beginning of devotion." — Mary Oliver The flutter has gone from my window now, and the shadows on my book have grown long again. Something of Stratton-Porter lingers in the room — that image of her waiting four hours in the Limberlost for a moth to emerge, her attention so complete that the swamp itself seemed to breathe in rhythm with her. I sit with that image for a moment,...
Chapter 2: The Severed Attention
May 15, 2026
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"Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed." — Rebecca Solnit The morning sun eases through my window as it breaks through the trees, casting long shadows across the book on my lap. Outside, the pine tree waves. I am researching Gene Stratton-Porter, who, on a similar morn...
Chapter 1: Found Wisdom for These Times
May 14, 2026
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The evening light filters through the maple leaves outside my window, casting dappled shadows across my desk. A cardinal—brilliant against the green backdrop—alights momentarily on a branch, tilts his head as if in silent inquiry, and then vanishes in a flutter of wings. The world unfolds in countless such moments of exquisite particularity, yet rarely are these moments fully inhabited, fully ...
Introduction: Witnessing the Living World
May 14, 2026
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