Did anyone else go to Catholic School?  Remember this: “Bless us, Oh Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen”?  I remember it more like this: “blessusohlordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceive…mmmmm…through  ChristourLordamen” followed by a mad dash, tripping over each other, to be first in the milk line (otherwise all the chocolate milk would be gone).

Ahhh…the old mealtime prayer.  Who would have thought, after suffering years of mindless daily genuflecting to the crucifix that I would actually be craving a mealtime moment of thanks?  And yet, I am.

My wheels are turning in every direction these days about slow living.  What is it, exactly?  What’s important to me about it?  How can I have more of it in my life?   I like to think that Slow Living is a much needed response to the overwhelming hustle and bustle of modern life — those pervasive and persistent feelings of rushing, of not having enough time, of too much to do.  It’s the antidote to having too many mediocre choices or conversely, not seeing we have choices at all.  Taking a tip from the fine folks over at Slow Food, I’ve come up with this working definition: Slow living is good, clean, and fair living. It is a worldview that encourages living our lives (work, play, relationships, choices) in a state of mindfulness that acknowledges both the interdependency of life on this planet and the sacredness of this moment itself.  The smart people over at slowmovement.com put the need for it this way,  “We may be living great lives but we aren’t “there” for them.”

Well said.  It’s seeing that I have plenty — everything I need — and wanting to truly take in all those pleasures that life offers.  I want to really see them, hear them, feel them, smell them, and taste them; to take life in with all five senses.

Perhaps it is easier said than done; I think we need to start small, or rather, start slow, as in taking a simple inventory of our daily and weekly routines and looking for places we might slow down and truly taste life.  For me, it began with the realization that at least 3 times a day, I have an opportunity to acknowledge all those forces that, quite literally, keep me alive.  Starting the simple but solid habit of taking a moment of appreciation before a meal has slowed me down considerably.

First, it took seeing that:

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harvesting, hauling, making available

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Stopping to really consider it, I do care (a lot) about these animals leading happy, healthy lives and I do care (deeply) about all the ways in which clean, fair food keeps the earth we share much more fertile for generations to come.  But what I’m feeling more clued into, as I stop to offer a bit of thanks before a meal, is the interdependency of our species.  The extent to which we rely on each other to play the roles we play is staggering.

Now when I sit down to eat, I feel a little like a famous actor preparing an Oscar acceptance speech…”well, I have so many people to thank….”

Yes, a thank you to the generous graces of the universe for granting me the enormously privileged life I lead — specifically, this food in front of me.  And at the end of the line, yes, thank you to the friends and family members I choose to share my meal with, particularly those who put loving energy into preparing it.  But what about all the middle-men?  What about gratitude to the cow for sharing her bounty (or sometimes, her life)?  What about the earnest soul of the tomato plant who thrusts itself into the light and comes into a beautiful, red, juicy being?  What about the worms who play their part, thanklessly enriching the soil, and each blade of grass that, almost rebelliously, grows back over and over again to feed the cow?  What about the precious water that catalyzes with everything to make food food?  And those are just the non-humans!

Let’s not forget the conscious farmers who choose to grow food and who toil hour after hour tending to the raw materials.  Then, there are all the extra farm-hand harvesters who do the sweaty work gathering all of our food for us.  There are the processors, the packagers, the transporters, the market owners, the stockers, the cashiers — ALL those players who are involved in bringing that little basket of berries to your food table.  (And we’ve only done one degree of separation.  If we were to also include ALL the people involved to sustain the lives of the people we’ve mentioned so that they can feed us, well, we’d be thanking so long our food would get cold.)

...without 1st having this

Suffice it to say, with all these forces of energy working together to bring food to my table, the least I can do is offer them a bit of thanks.  And, it brings me a little closer to the conscious, slower living that makes everything in life taste sweeter.

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some things never go out of style

Are you back on the wagon, readers?  I’m curious about what you’ve committed to for these 30 beautiful, wintry days.  Fess up — I’m dying to know.

The commitment I made for January was to write 30 letters (in 30 days.)  Not 30 emails.  Not 30 Facebook updates.  Certainly not 30 Twits, or Tweets, or whatever you call those things.  30 bonified letters  — you know, those pieces of paper that can cost several dollars to buy and another 44 cents to mail, and that, once the recipient receives them, bear old news.  Yep, those.

my favorite cards

I’ll be honest with you, it’s been quite a challenge.  I’m enjoying it.  I’m sensing some real appreciation from the fine folks I call friends and family.  I’ve even received two letters in return!  And, like many things in my world, the practice has brought up a host of metaphorically existential questions that have me considering the bigger picture of something as simple as scribbling off a small note to a loved one once a day.

Why walk when you can drive?  Why cook when you can order in?  Why knit a hat or a sew a skirt when you can buy either one for so much cheaper*?  And, why bother writing something longhand when the contemporary counterparts to letter-writing are cheaper, faster, more convenient, and more efficient?

They’re good questions.  They are big questions, actually, that give me pause.  I’m certain we all know quite well the beauty of a slower way of life — that’s why we take vacations, right?  So, we could ask, is more efficient always better?  Or, what’s with our obsession with efficiency, anyway?  Or, as my cousin Kristin queries, “what, exactly, are we in such a hurry to get to?”

handmade love

In truth, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t appreciate a slower, handmade, homemade life in some way.  Even my most “modern” tech-obsessed friends will still linger for hours over a long-cooked meal or insist on doing their own home renovations, and conversely, the most soulful person I know in the world is absolutely entranced by race cars.  We all know the convenience of speedy things, (they make our lives easier) and we all know the unmatchable feeling of being as close as possible to our own vitality, something I’d call slow living.

a cherishable correspondence

The reactions I hear when I tell people about my letter-a-day practice lead me to believe a lot of us are wanting to slow down, or at least, have some more slow living in our lives.  Maybe the so-called tension is understood less by analyzing our obsession with speed and efficiency (or boycotting it) and more by exploring our values — those intrinsic and highly personal beliefs about what is important in life. Culturally, we value newness, speed, and productivity — that stuff is easy to come by these days.  But individually, maybe we don’t, or don’t…as much.  Perhaps individually we value spaciousness, self-expression, or connection — those things hard-won via text message or while moving a 100 miles an hour. Maybe we are simply letting our cultural values run our lives?

So, how do we connect with our personal values and then let them dictate who and how we are more of the time?  Well, first we have to know what they are.  (Awareness is everything, right?)  What do you most value?  What’s most important to you?  Is it fully alive in your life?

Admittedly, I might have thrown in the towel on the 30-letter-in-30-days around Day 9 if I didn’t stop

a welcomed greeting

to consider what was really important about it for me.  When I saw that it was a practice that might build my reservoir of patience, and that it was a way to express (without my old favorite editing-tool, the delete button) my gratitude and love for people, it was easier to stick with it.  This small expression of slow living became more accessible to me once I understood where it was rooted.

Thanks for being with me on the Treelife Blog this January!  More on slow living coming soon.

*This is my first footnote on the Treelife Blog and I want to make it count.  “Cheaper” clothing, in almost any instance, is probably not cheaper when you actually consider ALL the costs involved.  Michael Pollan, with the help of his beloved farmer friend Joel Salatin, effectively articulates in Omnivore’s Dilemma the truth about the “higher cost” of organic food.  They put it this way, “whenever I hear people say clean food is expensive, I tell them it’s actually the cheapest food you can buy. That always gets their attention. Then I explain that with our [small-production/local/organic/sustainable] food all of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food.” While I know much less about the true costs of “cheap” clothing than I do about “cheap food” I know that the same basic principles apply.  That is, that the social, environmental, and long-term economic costs, notwithstanding the basic tenants of fair wages and fair trade, of producing cheap clothing are not figured into the price we pay for a pair of pants from the gap.  With mass-produced food and with mass-produced anything, really, true cost involves much more than the number of dollars we actually have to dig into our [mass-produced] pockets for.  Taking this into account, particularly if we are choosy about how we source our fabric and yarn, makes sewing a skirt or knitting a hat seem less-expensive than before.  For more information on true cost, check out The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization.