Soft, Slow, Enough
I have done only soft, slow things today and that is enough. This morning I walked down the path to a neighbor's house and shoveled her walk and cleaned off her car, because she is a neighbor and because she needed help. Because I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I have been shown softness when I needed help.
I walked down the path slowly and said hello to the little, peeking gratitude in my chest for how the snow made even my city neighborhood look like Narnia. The gratitude that always lives, though sometimes in the background of the desire to be living truly in the middle of the forest hearing only my own breath during a snowfall.
I swept the snow off her windshield. Slowly, meticulously clearing the ice from under her windshield wipers. Shaking the snow off the cushions on her patio furniture even though I knew she probably wouldn’t be sitting on them for another four months. Because cushioned deck chairs should just always look like they are ready to be sat in. Ready for a soft, slow human who wants to identify small, city bird sounds.
My phone rang half way through and it was the sick child on the couch back at home telling me he couldn’t find the remote, the child on some unimportant hour of screen time and a stomach bug. Soft and slow. Soft and slow.
I listened to the first voice in my head that worried it was too much tv, that chastised the fact that the show wasn’t something educational, that would have spiraled into all the things she could have been doing better or the mothering choices that could be judged far too harshly.
And the part of me that listened patiently to the worried mother was the wizened crone me, with her long gray braids and dedication to slowness, who wiped my worried mother's tears before they could even spring and smiled with mullein and yarrow growing from her teeth.
I’ve seen her before, standing on a small white bridge that crosses a trickling stream. I am always on the side of a grassy lawn and across the bridge behind her is a wild forest, and she always waits for me there on the bridge to take her hand so she can walk me from the manicured world of shoulds into the wild comfort of what really matters.
And I know she would jump right into that couch and watch all the cartoons with snuggles and giggles, devoid of all judgment. Only love. Only softness.
An astrologer once told me I had four yods in my chart, and while I can’t remember exactly everything that meant, I vividly remember her connecting multiple yods in a person’s chart to celebrities and politicians and humanitarians who have made global impact. But she had never seen four in one chart before.
I was supposed to shake shit up.
I remember instantly fearing that I would die someday, having not made whatever global impact I was supposed to make. Having only mothered my kids, and loved plants and my friends, and chosen gentleness for myself, and taken walks in the woods, and shoveled the neighbors' walk. Only…
But today I did only soft, slow things and that was enough. Today I decided I forgave someone, though I may never say it out loud, and they may never know anything momentous happened. And it was just a small, quick knowingness that I had done it. That I wanted to do it. And the love that flooded my heart was a homecoming I didn’t know I needed.
All while I stood at the kitchen counter re-warming my coffee over the stove. All while the laundry spun and the plow finally came and a friend dropped groceries at my doorstep.
And I keep thinking that maybe my world just needs to be small, and soft, and slow for my impact to be big. Sweep the steps, kiss the child, stir the soup, make the call, listen for the bird, forgive, forgive, forgive. Be led by the crone. Walk over the bridge. Ripple, ripple, ripple. One soft, slow day at a time out into the world.
