Tag: slow pace

Excerpt from Less Helping Them, More Healing You: The Transcendent Gifts of an Ancient Spiritual Practice, by Jean P. Kelly

FROM AS EARLY as I can remember, I hurried—thinking fast, talking fast, walking fast, eating fast. Patience is a virtue, but not mine, until I was required to accept the pace of nature. From the moment I first indulged the human impulse to cultivate — caring for fellow humans or flora and fauna—I signed a contract with an immutable timeline. New life of any kind, growing inside a human body or coaxed from the earth, emerges slowly, according to a cosmic clock and without regard for even the most intense impatience. Anyone who has taught or mentored anyone, whether a child or an employee, knows that attempts to rush maturity imperils the end results: both sustainable growth and the satisfaction of witnessing it firsthand. Nature, both human and environmental, goes slow.

In the practice of Spiritual Reading, transitioning from meditation—summoning and serving, to contemplation—slowing and stilling, cannot be forced nor rushed. We must lose track of time, just as we do whenever we are immersed in an activity we love. When in nature—in my garden, I mark minutes only by the position of the sun relative to the scale of my ambition for the day. In that way, I experience a bit of eternity. Timelessness is an enticement to go slow, to surrender my agenda.

To this day, nothing centers and slows me faster than feet on earth and skin in sun. Immersion in the natural world, whether walking in a meadow or hiking a gorge, has provided spiritual connection for centuries. “Creation is the song of God,” wrote medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen, also an herbalist and healer. She taught that being out of sync with the beauty and fecundity of nature is to deny the force which enlivens body and soul. She called this force viriditas, the Latin word for “greenness.” We are not above nature, but an intimate part of it. In the wonder and splendor of nature, she saw a divine underpinning that sustained not only the earth but also the cosmos.

To this day, nothing centers and slows me faster than feet on earth and skin in sun.

Jean P. Kelly

Continue reading “Rediscovering Serenity: Slow Down and Embrace Nature’s Wisdom” →