Join me on my slow living journey... 

I started a writing project a few years ago where I take time I feel I don't have and allow myself space to write. Whatever it is that I write on those sporadic writing adventures I filed away as my "Slow Living Journal".  Slowing down, making time for quiet thought, allowing some freewriting ala Natalie Goldberg is a seductive and regenerative process. As we self-isolate through this COVID-19 pandemic, I highly encourage you, writer or not, to give it a try.

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Laura L. Hansen, Poet

slow
/sloʊ/ Show Spelled [sloh] Show IPA adjective, slow·er, slow·est, adverb, slow·er, slow·est, verb
adjective
1.
moving or proceeding with little or less than usual speed or velocity: a slow train.
2.
characterized by lack of speed: a slow pace.
3.
taking or requiring a comparatively long time for completion: a slow meal; a slow trip.
4.
requiring or taking a long time for growing, changing, or occurring; gradual: a plant of slow growth.


Here is a bit of writing I found on a scrap of paper while doing some light cleaning:
 
“The match-strike of the sun
ignites the kindling trees.
Dusk flares over water
changing as quickly as
the color of your eyes,
heron gray then clear-sky blue
then storm-on-the-horizon green.
A puff of wind and the match
is extinguished, nighttime
looms and the sun falls away
like our moods.” 
 
(April or May 2015)

An Indication of Living
 
The sliding screen door is torn in the lower corner, repaired with gorilla tape, and spilt apart again – indication of a small impatient blunt-nosed dog who wants out for squirrels, for duties, for fresh air, for flies on the screen, for pontoons passing, for river waves that laugh and taunt with their constant motion.
 
The green pillow is on the floor again, tossed aside by the practical no-frills man who wants to sit up straight on the couch and nods off sitting up while watching baseball or Criminal Minds or Law and Order or the ten o’clock news.
 
The kitchen counter, cleared and scrubbed yesterday, is a nesting spot for empty cans of pop, for the blue plastic ½ cup measuring cup that serves as a scoop for dog food, for a tangle of kitchen towels that have been rescued from the dogs who pull them down off the handle of the stove at every opportunity.
 
The bedroom is a mess of clothes ready to be folded and hung and another pile ready to go down for laundering, of shoes for work, and shoes for home, and sandals for warm afternoons. And books. Books fill all the spaces in the bedside tables including the drawers along with an assortment of bookmarks, pens, tissues, throat lozenges and calming music CD’s.
 
The dresser, recently or somewhat recently dusted, is home to a scattering of earrings, rings, hearing aid batteries, and loose buttons. The drawers are crookedly open with pastel cotton underwear and rolled socks poking out at the corners; the drawers too full or too hastily packed.
 
The hallway is a minefield of dog toys -  a striped squeaky sock monkey blessed with a perpetual grin, two nubby blue chew bones (one for each dog) and a toy we call chuck-a-duck (don’t ask). The vacuum cleaner lives there too, never quite gets put away, just moves from one end of the hall to the other as if following the little rolling leaves of dog hair as they waft from one corner to another.
 
The dining room table is a bill pay center one week, a place to do puzzles the next, and an assembly line of poetry submissions another. Sometimes one or two or three manage to clear it off and eat there.
 
The house has extra rooms and closets full of photos and plates and clothes and leavings of other family members and other generations. It is cluttered even when clean. Clutter, I recently heard a man say on TV, is an indication of living*.
 
If that is the case, then there is much living here and though I admire the homes in my decorating magazines - the pristine white cottage interiors, the thoughtfully organized collections - they will never be this house, this house that at every corner has indications – proof – of the life we’ve lived and are living.
 

• American Pickers; Coin-Op Kings Episode