Always Go Slower

For a long time I walked quickly. Some people actually refused to walk with me because I went so fast. It's true! But as I have grown older, I have slowed down. It's not a physical constraint but something else. I look around more. That is part of what slows me down: there is more to see, more to hear, more to smell. How grateful I am to this body which so perceives the world! It is a kind of love to give attention, a very gentle and non-dramatic kind of love, and like all gifts it goes both ways, giver and receiver made one. The smashed body of the possum at the end of Radiker Road, indentations in the field where yesterday were bales of hay, smoke from the wood stove, the way a loaf of just-baked bread can seem to float in your hands. I am not in a hurry anymore because nothing the world offers is less than amazing. It turns out that what I long called a mystery wants to be solved. It turns out that in the welter of attention it solves itself. And loveliest of all is that no matter how slow I go, I can always go slower. I learned that this summer watching a birch tree grow in the forest. How brief I was to it, as the cricket is to me, and yet how brief it was to the quartz stones jumbled about its roots. Was it eternity I glimpsed in that moment? Or merely a stillness confused with ideas about Heaven? I am a fool of course - and anybody who listens to me is a fool - but oh what a sweetness fills my days! And always there! Waiting on notice!