Less Striving, More Slowing

A few weeks ago I realized I was ready to write again.

I have filled several journals with my words these past months.  My fingers found their place curled around a pen, rather than dancing across a keyboard.  But lately, I have felt them restless for a dance.  Today I am turning them loose.

For nearly 6 months now,  I have been moving slow through my hours alone.  I have lingered.  I have sacrificed productivity for healing.  Of course, nothing could have been more productive for me in this season than healing.

Mountains have been moved.  Wounds have been bound up and grown over with fresh skin.  Miracles keep blossoming like the star magnolia outside my office window, scattering white petals across the yard below.  Sometimes the most significant things in our lives come slowly.

But, still, I have not felt productive - and with good reason.

The kind of work that needed to be done this past year was beyond my capability.
I could. not. do it.
I had to let it be done to me.  It feels like little effort yet, for me, restraining the striving takes tremendous effort - a kind I typically avoid.

Why is it easier to strive than to stand still?  To sit, listen, let the layers fall away and then, stay.  To resist the instinct to run.

Perhaps running is my addiction, and so to stop it, release it, sends me into withdrawal.  I hunger for the movement.  I watch enviously as others get ahead, at breakneck speed, leaving me behind.  I don't like being left behind.  This has been the gift of stepping completely away from social media for an extended time.  I don't spend my time observing other people's apparent forward movement, while my life appears to be in a holding pattern.  This is one way I am cultivating habits to curb my addiction to forward movement.

Despite my fear that something awful might happen if I'm not keeping up with the rest of the ambitious pack, I have found that the further away the front runners get, the quieter and calmer I find my surroundings to be.  I hear the bluebirds singing spring back to us.  I see the blades of grass in a dense dance.  I see the squirrel peeking through my office window with an acorn in his mouth.  I watch my son's finger trail beneath the words of the Book of Common Prayer during an Ash Wednesday service, and I am stunned to tears.  Stunned at all I have run from.  Stunned by the realization that there is far more beauty and truth here, where I am, than up there wherever I was headed.  

This beauty is real, not anticipated.  It is tangible, touchable, not just imaginable.  Oliver leans his head onto my shoulder as we remember the story of our dusty beginning and our dusty ending, and I know that this in-between place is meant to be seen, tasted, touched, heard.  I could squander this time following signs pointing only to tomorrow, running down that road of aspirations.   Instead I am daily choosing the present over the future and walking over running, as I wait for quiet revelation and restoration, right where I am.