Live Slowly

No one was around this particular rock. They were busy swarming with one another to get the best glimpse of the bigger rocks in the distance. Half Dome and El Capitan commanded the scenery and there was my empty rock as the perfect seat.

I was sitting but feeling like I was flying. My eyes roved first out long over the mountain tips then lowered into the rare greenscape of pine trees below. The motion dizzied and enthralled me. I debated slipping down into the green from my lonesome rock to wander and immerse myself in the view, but then I wouldn't be able to see as far. Nature wouldn't rock me with its powerful stillness and solidity.

I posted that picture on Instagram and the caption reads, "I think if I were to sit here a bit longer, the world would altogether make a little more sense and I would feel a little more whole." Something about something so big and so still gives off the air of decidedness. The Yosemite landscape wasn't moving and it had decided that long ago. Now we get to swarm and enjoy it's confidence.

When I was in California visiting legendary sites of Death Valley, Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe, I thought about how one needed to craft their life to be able to live in these places or visit them often. I'm not graduating for another two years, but I do think a lot about the kind of life I will lead and how the one I'm leading now is helping or hindering me. I thought about how I've always loved the water because it screams limitlessness yet is unconquerable. I thought about refusing to learn from mountains but how I couldn't help it anymore.

I want to live slowly, decidedly like the mountains, so that my confidence will mean something. Traditionally, its seems my endless energy gets the best of me and corrals me into the riptide of the hurried. Do I thrive in the limitless jet stream? Or do I merely lack skills to live slowly so I stay in the familiar? I don't have a problem getting alone with my thoughts, processing what the Lord is saying to me, and getting enough sleep (...most days). I have a problem with accepting the totality of this "live slowly" mantra.

I want to do all the things. I don't think there's anything deeper going on there. I love life and want to romp around as long as my legs work. But if I just "do" all the things, that's all I've done. With my sporadic passions looking like they will always be apart of me, like the waves of the sea, I'm trying to channel this desire to do and go and see and conquer into soaking, being, learning, welcoming, and lingering.

Live and linger. Live to linger. And this can only happen if I live slow.

I'm writing a book right now (surprise!) and it more or less needs all of my attention. So do other books. I wrote this about my writing philosophy last night. I'm not even sure if it's what I really think or if I agree with it but it's what came out:

"It's a relationship, not an authorship. Fall in love with it. Forgive it if you get in a fight and be willing to confess when you're wrong. Don't reign it in; teach it to be itself. It's not an animal. The story and the writing chose you. Give it a place to grow and say to the world what it wants to."

It's the closest thing I have to having a child, I suppose. A lot of these thoughts were influenced by Stephen King who parallels writing to digging a fossil out of the ground as intact as you possibly can get it. As you linger through life, you notice the fossil (the story) and use your best tools (writing practice) to unearth it (write it). I think on this and think about how intimately I need to know my sentences and paragraphs; how confident I must be that when its cover is closed all the words will get along together while I'm away. Please play nice.

That takes so much time. It takes so much time to make great art. It takes so much time to let great art penetrate you and be known as great to you. It takes so much time to linger and soak in what's around you. It takes a slow life to develop the decidedness and confidence of mountains.

I'm reading Anne Lamott's Imperfect Birds novel right now. She quotes Rilke, "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

I just really need to sit on that for awhile before I'm comfortable sticking in my back pocket to use later.

And a thought by Lamott, "L.O.V.E: Letting others voluntarily evolve." It knocks me over unless I reach out slowly to understand it.

Then again, I've also said and learned from Steven Elliot's The Adderall Diaries, "It takes a night to write a book. It takes ten years to have a story." Life gives you great stories to write. Art makes life worth living and slowing down for. It's a cycle I plan to dive headlong into and see where it takes me. I perceive it thus far to be a slow and steady current.

I plan on waking up early and slow, being surrounded by a hodge podge library of books because there are too many people with too many amazing stories, and staring out my window with tea letting the view (whatever it may be...maybe the mountains) inspire and welcome me. And I plan to have fun and let it steep into my soul wholly and slowly. I plan to remember my life, and since my memories and thought life seem to happen in slow-mo anyway, might as well bring it to life.