patience

SLOWER

/ janpriddyoregon / 19 Comments

Before I thought of myself as a writer, I thought of myself as an artist—not incompatible identities. Among the many lessons I learned as a visual artist that also apply to literary arts: slow down. Wait. Wait. Wait. The eye (thought) moves faster than the hand on the page; you have to slow down so that the hand can keep up.

Thought is like that too. We can think 1300 words a minute. We can read a fraction of that and write even fewer. Everything jumps ahead of itself with the result that what we read or record skips like a pebble over a smooth pond. What we think we know and what is there, if we take time to look. All that water below… If we want to reveal it all, we must slow down to see it.

The gray gulls above are juveniles; the white-headed and breasted ones are adults. You might guess from this photo: there are a great many kids this year—more than half of those resting onshore. Forty-seven birds shown; seventeen are adults. Mist began yesterday on our shore and the air quality index began to drop. This morning the drizzle started and air quality became breathable throughout the western edges of the Pacific NW from the Willamette Valley north to Puget Sound, Portland to Seattle. I got my short two mile run this morning. Ballots arrived today. Our property tax info came in the mail and the RMV (real market value) of our home has been set at one and a third times what it was last year.
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