Slow is Beautiful

Blown out hair and Paris Twilight nails. Frozen eyebrows and painted penciled lips. Suitcases stuffed with Lulu Lemon stretchy pants and coolers full of expensive juices. Spike heels and belly tops.

I am in shock. I tug at my skirt dirty with compost and oak leaves, wipe my face with the back of my hand and hope I sucked all the kale greens from my teeth. My fingernails are black with soil from the farm, my arms and face brown and freckled from living and working outdoors.

I help load a cart to help one of these LA yoga retreaters up the hill. She insists on pulling with me, a refreshing change from some of the others who call us porters or girls, their Om t-shirts and Namaste greetings thinly veiling impatience and a distant questioning about room service. 

I breathe in, ground myself, ask where are you from, how was the drive, have you been to this semi-wild land before? She is steps ahead of me, pulling pulling pulling and the cart starts to wobble with the disparity. “Am I walking really quickly or is there something wrong with...the cart?” she asks me. “You are walking pretty quickly,” I answer. She doesn’t slow down. I sense her frustration. But I am not going to speed up. I am quietly laughing to myself, not at her but because I am astonished with myself; I am usually the one who is pulling the hardest, glaring at the slow movers, wanting to get things done done done. 

But on this land I have slowed down and want to welcome that pace in others. How else can you notice all this beauty? I wake with the sunrise with roosters crowing in the valley below after the coyotes have sung their final verse. I move and write and sip and read. I wander through the oaks and wild buckwheat and stop to notice the scrub jay on a branch or how the lizard moves over the dusty clay road. I have time for two-hour meals and take even longer to chop, blend, press, preserve all those farm vegetables I picked this week. I have time to ask, “How are you doing?” and not mean it as a Hey. I actually want to know, want you to talk with me, want to hear your stories and dreams and what you cried about all morning in your tent or why you've been singing love songs all afternoon.

And I don’t want to go back to a place, a space where this isn’t normal.

I lead her to her sleeping space, this woman in a hurry to meditate, to retreat. She loves the view of the orchards in the valley, the rustic beds in the yurt. She wonders about finding the bathroom in the night. I say you can always just go here, motioning to the leaf-littered ground. 

She looks confused. 

I don’t explain. 

I leave her to unpack, feeling a strange pause, knowing that she wondered for a moment about tipping me for my help. I walk away, dragging the cart behind me. Slowly meditating on how I would explain to her that this is my service, this is my way of making this land a more beautiful place by welcoming those who may experience the magic too. That generosity with time and help is not a transaction here. It is an offering. An invitation for connection and interaction, with the people, with the animals and plants, with the everything. 

It took me weeks to get to this unwinding, slow, deliberate point. To the point where I am shocked at this group of “mindful” people and depleted by the searching superficiality I sense in so many of these yoga-fit bodies. I don’t want to judge; I’ve been there too and perhaps am better able to recognize this desperation because of my own struggles. My own weekend retreats (Fix me! Fix me! Give me peace and love in my heart by Sunday, goddammit!), my mala bead groping on the stern of a yacht (dissipate my anger! Maybe one more chant will make me see the good in these people!), my stack of expensive spirituality books (one more paragraph closer to enlightenment). 

I still have a long way to go. 

I am grateful for how far I have come.

I look forward to seeing the transformation. To seeing the woman who brought only heels barefoot on the land. To seeing clean, unvarnished faces sweaty with hope and motion. To seeing the inner workings rise and the chaos of LA fall away into the spaces between the flagstones where the bobcat preens and stalks. I don’t want to have too many expectations, to harbor too many dreams for this bunch. But why not? Between the moving and writing and sipping and reading, why not cast out dreams of healing for these wanderers? That is my service, that is my unbinding contract with the transactionless universe. That is what the land has given me: hope, dreams, and a heaping cart full of love that I can slowly pull and disperse as I go. 

This is what I will take with me when I pack up my car in a couple of weeks. 

This is what I will remind myself of when I slip on heels and brush on mascara and play Big City with the rest of mankind.

This is the space to which I will always return now that I've tasted it. 

Not necessarily to this location, 

but to this groundedness, 

this sacredness, 

this wholeness, 

this living.