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 a bit of time to write. Whatever it is that I write on those sporadic writing adventures I filed away as my "Slow Living Journal".  Slow 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.

March 19, 2020 

I took a short drive this morning passing along the fog-laden farm fields east of town. It was calming in a way my needy messy house cannot be. The fields this time of year...damp, snow-patched and fallow...are in a state of waiting, as are we. The leafless trees seem less stark wrapped in fog, this fug of moisture being released from the slowly thawing ground. I inhaled the heavy air, held it in my winter-dry lungs. Here, at least, alone in my car, there is no fear of what will be breathed in other than a bit of snow mold and exhaust. Who thought my allergic nemesis - mold - and this climate changing automotive combustion would on an early spring day in the year 2020 be a breath of fresh air, a safe place from contagion? 

Some excerpts from the journal follow. I will be refreshing this area with newer posts over the next few weeks. 

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.

 
A Plant of Slow Growth
 
I learned this week, or re-learned, what it is like to not work six days a week. I learned that there are benefits to a slower pace. I spent time, real time, uninterrupted time, at home with friends. I wrote. I brushed the dogs. I planted. I took an inordinate amount of time picking out two little 4-packs of marigolds. I took so long, the sales lady laughingly advised me that they closed at 7:00 PM. This was at two in the afternoon and it was clear to her I was going to take hours to spend my allotted three dollars.
 
Last night, I baked pineapple muffins at midnight knowing no matter how long it took them to cool, it didn't matter. I could stay up late. And I did. I read late into the night enjoying every word and every thought. I read slowly. Thoroughly.
 
Today I sat in my favorite chair. Seems like a small thing, but I bought it eight months ago and rarely was home to use it. I dug in drawers, not because I needed anything or because I was cleaning out or because I was organizing. I was just curious what was there.
 
Under a pile of magazines in my writing files I found a 1940's photo of my Mom and Dad and my nephew's graduation picture and some pics of the dogs. How did they get dropped in there? Probably from cleaning in too much of a hurry. Surfaces are easy to make look clean in a jiffy if you mindlessly throw things in cupboards and drawers.
 
And I found that opening up time for friends opens you up to their blessings. You get to share in little jokes, do puzzles, to accept their offerings. Knowing I wasn't able to spend on annuals for the planters this year, friends brought me day lilies and hostas and sedum and salvia culled from their own gardens.
 
I've read that friendship is a plant of slow growth, and that is true. But it is also fed by cross-pollination and companion planting. What I have may be of use to you, and what you no longer need may be just the ticket for me. Your drawing may set my mind to thinking and in a day or two I may send a poem your way. I've never been one for sewing but these buttons in the bottom of the drawer may set you off on a new craft project. Sometimes we have nothing to share but silence. And that is slow living, too.
 
Day Two
 
The more I allow myself to rise late, the earlier I seem to wake. It may just be the early sunrise. In a few weeks the days will infinitesimally start to shorten, but for now taking the day at a slow measured pace is easy with so much daytime to work with. It feels luxurious to shuffle out to the mailbox in bathrobe and slippers at nine or ten in the morning. It is equally luxurious to lay back in the lawn chair past nine waiting for the sun to set. To see her wrap herself for the night in wispy scarves of bruise-blue and plum and peach.
 
I haven't yet learned the art of meals at home, especially lunch. I am still moved to get in the car and go for a bite. More planning is needed for a healthy alternative, for fresh fruit (that too quickly spoils), for yogurt and carrots and luncheon meat in small one-person packages. I can picture myself out on the boathouse deck with a bowl of grapes and some string cheese, but it hasn't happened yet.
 
Actually there are so many things I readily imagine; long walks, watering plants, clean kitchen counters, but that I never seem to put into action. I can see my limbs moving, the smile on my face, arms swinging along full of energy. The trick is getting started, getting out of bed, off the couch, turning the PC off. Maybe I am lazy or maybe it is just too early. Maybe there are seven stages of transition and I am stuck at relaxing.
 
 September 7, 2013
 
All day I've been moving around the gallery, and every time I see a sign for pottery my mind transposes
the word to poetry. I suppose it is just the similar combination of letters but it feels significant somehow as if my mind is trying to tell me something about what I need to be doing or about the inherent similarity of not just the words but of the art.
We write by hand; we type with our fingers, we wrap our palms around clay and smooth and shape.  But poetry is more than the act of putting words on paper.  Poetry is sound and thought and intercession and mica in rock and clay that rolls off our fingers like heat waves on a summer day. Poetry is words in their molten form, thought fired by language.
 
Surely this metaphor is too pure, too obvious, and yet the pottery cools in front of my eyes and the words waver and poetry takes physical from there. There, where the wheat is impressed into the pot's curved side. Here, where I press down on the keys with fingers that know before my mind knows where the ridge needs to be smoothed, where to apply a curved lip, what color the glaze will turn as it bakes in the kiln of your eyes.

Time Alone
 
 I love the days I go to work, but I also love the days in between when I can stay home and let my creativity breathe. On my days off, the air feels lighter. I move with less weight to my body. I am able to take time to see what my art needs to be nourished. Sometimes that means spending time on my own and sometimes it means time with friends. My friends make sure I take time to laugh, and that is important. Time with friends is also time spent listening. Expanding. Empathizing. Time on my own is an essential nutrient. Time on my own is not necessarily time alone. I have my dogs with me, and the chatter of birds, squirrels, the voice of the river and in autumn, of leaves. Birds dart and peck, squirrels leap from tree to grass and to tree again, the river changes color with the mood of the sky. Leaves wave their hands slowly to and fro in the breeze like dignitaries at a Fourth of July parade. My on my own world is peopled in this way, quiet yet capricious.

There are times when little synchronicities happen or appear in our lives – or at least in mine – that take the status of significance. Like Masha Hamilton posting an Adrienne Rich poem today which ends “a book of myths/in which/our names do not appear.” A few months ago I wrote a poem that I gave the working title “Myth Poem One” as if I inherently knew at that point that there would be more myth poems to follow. And there have been some in the past months that have the quality of myth. So I wrote in my journal and in my writing plan that I needed to revisit the literature of myth, to explore World Mythologies. Then I started thinking about putting together a chapbook of myth poems as I've taken to calling them. After a few more coincidental “myth sightings” Facebook entry from Masha Hamilton. Maybe we grant too much emotional weight to coincidence when we dub them synchronous, but then again sometimes life's mile markers aren't printed out in luminous white letters on reflective green signs. Sometimes we need to be like a wilderness tracker stepping lightly and watching for the slightest sign, a stripped twig, a crushed leaf, the merest drop of blood.
 
The Night Sphere
 
At night, the light is brightest.
The high beams of a solitary car on a county road
cutting in and out of trees is more important
than the thousand lights of the city –
the heat of a single firefly more magnetic
than all the sodium streetlamps
and flashing semaphores of the towns.
The nighttime lures like a bonfire,
its aurora more elegant and assured
than all the city’s fluorescent declarations,
On Tap, Open Late, Huge Sale, Nude Girls.
 

April 15, 2014
Parked Near the Wildlife Management Area off Rocheleau Road
Click here for video poem.
 
Neither winter with its white trappings and stark trees nor spring with its salacious budding greens, this is the dead time of brown trees in blurry lines and of the bone dry detritus of last year’s grasses. Dust fills the parking lot and lines the fields. This is pre-spring, post-winter, the world as yet unfurled. The bare tops of trees are like dry paint brushes lacking a palette. Even the silence here is sandpaper dry. The trees, unmanned by birds of any kind, are mute. This is pre-life, a listless anxious waiting. Even the evergreens seem lackluster. It is hard to imagine how rife with life these fields will be in a few months with fresh grasses sawing in the wind, trees budded out and softly green, waterfowl flocking the pond. It is a matter of faith, of belief, and experienced knowing that season follows season and despite this ominous pause the patterns of the past will resurface, reoccur. For now, it is all architecture, all the elements exposed like an abandoned construction site poised to resume its work of greening, of growing, of rebirth. And in these simple unpainted lines – the fencepost, the etching of birch and aspen at the meadow’s edge – I feel a calm reassurance, knowing what I have here in my idle hands is an hour well-spent.


Saying Goodbye
 
I’m saying goodbye to vacation and friends, best trip
ever.
                I am shaking the hands of the maple leaves,
trading
                one season for another.
I’m opening my box of old letters, running fingers
through airmail-thin envelopes like
                running fingers through an old woman’s thinning
hair.
I’m saying hello to Nuria in Spain, to Antonio.
I’m letting my thoughts run wild on a beach
in the Pacific where my father once held a giant whelk,
once threw the stinking mutton overboard
                wanting to save his crew from that culinary
assault.
I’m remembering ambrosial Leg of lamb for Easter
and wondering how Father forgave that cut of meat
for its World War II deceit, for its corpse-rotten
smell.
I am reaching into a box of memories, postcards,
letters
and saying goodbye to 1968, to 1974, to today.
I am saying hello to the next letter in the box,
                to the next bill, to the final notice.
I am putting the garbage out, heaving it over
the ship’s rail, singing my father’s
song.
 

 
Slow Living Journal September 18, 2014

The hummingbird – in my mind, as I always think of them – are either there or they are not, are either dipping through the air in flight or hovering to sip and feed. Until today I’d never seen one simply sitting still.
This morning I saw a female Ruby-Throated Hummingbird – female, because she bore no red mark across her delicate neck – feeding at the open lips of the tiny yellow and white candy-striped petunias that drape from a basket beside my back door. She nosed into each flower, one then over, two then over, three then over, four then over, five, then she flew up into the branches of the lightning-stuck ash.
I’d never observed a hummer so close for such an extended time, though in truth it was probably less than a half-a-minute. She was hovering only a few feet from me as I watched, stock-still, from behind the grey screen door. I was even more thrilled to see her not in the expected hovering or flight mode but becalmed for a few minutes in the nearby tree.
It was like seeing an acquaintance who you know only through the busy motions of their work-a-day, errand-filled day at rest in their own home. You always thought they chattered and bustled and organized and worked until they dropped into sleep and are surprised to find they have quiet inner moments just like you.
And in the dark bowers of that brown-leafed tree, the hummingbird’s iridescence fades into a dark olive green with only her curved onyx bill reflecting a bit of sun. Suddenly this tiny bird with its flitting energy and fast-forward to pause to fast-forward movement is just another stalled poet waiting for words.

 A Birthday Greeting for Suz, January 1, 2015

 When I tell people to write I tell them to just start, to put pen to paper or hands to keyboard and just go. Let mind connect to heart to gut to elbows to fingertips to neurons to solar flares to guitars strumming in the night hours around camp fires with owls hooting in the distance and the drone of a fighter jet leaving its nearly silver contrail in the night sky like the tail of a comet come to bless a new year and write as if that new year were already a fait accompli and that all of it was wrapped in the magic of words that trailed behind us like the Milky Way being absorbed into a universe expanding away into years innumerable and into small kindnesses and into waters spreading out like a delta into oceans rimed with the salt of long survival and the roar of our blood in our ears and in our palms and in our guts and in our hearts pumping poems down to fingertips hot the with love of language and of life. - Laura

 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

Slow Living Journal

Reading a collection of John Koethe poems today I came across one of those phrases that you immediately want to write down, that seem effusive with significance. I was at work, on break, and interrupted by questions and lunchroom chatter and so was forced to set the book aside. Later, I scanned the poems, rifled through pages and the phrase was gone. I was so sure of it, right-hand page, two-thirds of the way down, neither at the end nor the beginning of the book. But it was not there. Tonight I google Koethe, google Sally’s Hair, google “in love with short-lived things”. Not hits. It is irony, of course, that the phrase I crave but have so quickly lost is about the thing so loved but destined to be lost. Poetry, you are so wise…and so cruel. – Laura L. Hansen, June 24, 2016

 Stretch

My word this month is stretch as in to elongate, make bigger, flex outward or upward, grow. I am trying to stretch beyond my comfort zone, stretch the days to allow for more hours of writing, lengthen my reach by submitting poems to places and journals I’ve never tried before now. I have vowed to keep moving, keep writing, exploring…to not let my writing muscles get stiff from disuse. I vow to make myself open to chance and happenstance and risk, to let my sentences grow out of control like the seed-topped unmown grass in the field. I will yoga my mind into new positions, strike a warrior writer pose and begin.

January 22, 2017

The poem goes out to march in the streets but gets caught up in a crowd headed to a concert. Instead of guitars strumming songs of peace there are stacks of metallic-rimmed drums wildly beating and she finds herself dancing. Electric guitars screech as if wired directly into her brain; she is buzzing. In the strobe lights over the stage she sees the singer toss his head and globes of sweat launch and float up in the air like weather balloons rising on the heat of the crowd. Bodies bounce against her, bounce her into other bodies. Feet stomp and tangle. She finds her arms inadvertently interlaced with a stranger’s. This loud fury, she thinks, is my peace. This chaotic roil of sound is my silence. 

Laura L. Hansen