SLOW DOWN

SLOW DOWN

Many adults seem to have forgotten the benefits of walking - that it was their first independent mode of transportation. I love to walk for exercise but have experienced physical limitations lately. So, an encouragement to “sit” while walking by an author that I am reading was intriguing… sounds a bit unorthodox, doesn’t it? I tried it.

Here’s how the thirty-minute walk unfolded.

As I raised the garage door, Mr. Earthworm wiggled impatiently on the rapidly heating aggregate driveway and greeted me. I apologized to him and just in case he didn’t notice, said, “I am not my husband. I will not pick you up to place you in the wet cooler grass.” After a photo, I walked away to the soundtrack of lawnmowers and nails being hammered. Ms. Lavender Bloom waved, and I sauntered over for a closer look. How she had escaped the nibbling deer from the night before, I don’t know. Perhaps the sweet potato vines had satisfied their hunger. Moving leisurely along the sidewalk, I soon tuned into the orchestra of the birds. Every now and then, the lawnmowers and the hammers would rest, and the birds’ songs would soar on the waves of the hot humid air. The hot day was not without relief. Just as my pace increases, a cool breeze would wash across my face reminding me of my goal, to sit with nature and myself by walking.

Fine tuning my impaired hearing even more, I gradually noticed the void of traffic. And then I heard it, the distant rumbling of a train rolling along and its occasional whistle. It wasn’t the train that runs along the track a quarter of a mile from my house. With noise stripped away I heard the distant train. That was a miracle.

Turning into my subdivision’s common space, I felt as if I entered a sound war zone. Two riding lawnmowers were battling three workers edging and two others blowing debris and grass shavings from the pavement. My state of conscious peace was threatened. A soothing inner voice spoke, “peace is not the absence of noise.”  I walked to the bridge that crosses a small stream. Frequent pop-up thundershowers had provided water for the usually dry stream bed. I stood looking and listening to the sound of the clear running water and the wheezing of lawnmowers, edgers and blowers receded into the background. My eyes were drawn upward to the canopy of trees. There in the middle stood a giant sycamore tree, its grayish bark peeling, raising its arms to the creator of the universe. The tree was not new. I had walked across that bridge for the last eighteen years and never noticed it. I knew my sitting while walking was for this moment.

Deuteronomy 5:33

PONDER THIS THOUGHT--- Silence and slowness is such an unusual act that they can stop things.