TIME? IT'S ALWAYS NOW

Okra sprout and sundial
~ 9am (CDT) this morning

I am the slowest person I know. Blind people pass me on the side walk — walking my direction. Friends wipe their mouths after dessert and look for the check while I am still relishing the salad and anticipating the entrée. Even bicycles keep the myriad details in the scenery going by too fast for me, so mine remains by the front door being covered in vines while I walk everywhere. When I really enjoy the wisdom of the wit writ in a book, I limit the quantity of new ideas taken in at one sitting rather than turn pages all night for the pleasure in the prose. I never ask folks questions about themselves, knowing they will volunteer what they care I know by their own warming to me.

This all goes to demonstrate how surprised I am upon discovering the remnants of the rat race pace whose fumes still infect my metabolism way back here in the cheap bleachers whenever I get impatient for seedlings to sprout or blossoms to bloom or fruit to set or weather to change or seasons to pass. Content to rise before dawn, sit in my potting shed, sip my ganjava brew, and join the flowers, leaves, sleeping dogs and shadows as they track the earth’s rotation beneath the energizing aura of the radiant sun, I yet find myself sketching lines and numbers in this journal to ideate several ways to mark its 15°/hour pace; with long, thin slots admitting light for only two minutes on either side of each hour or with a single nail driven into a south facing surface. I went with inserting a beautiful painted chopstick into the garden at 30° 14’ 39.57” (courtesy Google Earth precision) pointing north at the pole star and placing small pebbles (courtesy natural earth provision) in the hourly shadow on the soil. I’ve planted a peach seed beneath the whole arrangement whose disruption I welcome and try not to anticipate as I learn to go slower even yet. I may yet catch up with nature’s tempo.

At the end of the day I realize I have done nothing but follow my body’s inspirations around and observe the results like an embedded journalist. Yet the compost gets turned, the garden weeded and watered, the chickens fed, eggs collected and the trellis gets reinforced against the burgeoning jasmine arching over the shed. I often question whether I am running the show or merely doing my body’s bidding while claiming responsibility for the good acts and blaming the environment for my snafus. It gets pretty hard to tell sometimes what with nature being on both sides of my skin.