Nature is slow, and so am I

Over the years I transformed from a traveler going from city to city to one who’s avoiding them. Simply because cities are stressful, where nature is powerful. I guess age has to do with it as well?

Pretty sure age has to do with is, since I started to embroider in nature. You need a decent amount of calmness and patience to pull a needle through a piece of fabric, or perhaps tiredness has to do with it?

Because I started to embroider while I was solo touring the world on a bicycle and I continue to do so while sitting on the back of my husband’s Paraguayan motorbike.

By now, I can not stand to be in a city, surrounded by energies buzzing around my ears, entering my brain and sit in my mind.

Although trying to avoid fast modes of transport I red this in the airplane towards Paraguay, and could not agree more:

The world moves at a faster pace than ever

But to many of us it looks like we are nowhere going fast

Fast is downing a double espresso while rushing to work

Fast has us watching five seasons of a show on Netflix in one gulp

Fast has made the week speed by because we were too busy to stop and look around

Fast isn’t forward

We’re from the slow country

We have a different pace of life

Slow is smart

Slow is a skill

Slow is progress

Pause more, live more

I think our bodies are made to be used, rather toil the soil than to sit in office. Our minds are invented to be in nature, not between walls all day.

Nature is important for our brains. The feeling of absorption is total and wholesome when we are in nature.

A sky full of stars let me feel that I exist, that I am alive. All else falls quiet by witnessing dots of light against a dark indigo sky. The silence is everywhere. Around me, in my head and in my ears. Everything is being omitted; worries, dreams, thoughts, fears, hope, wishes, things, hassle.

The woods, where sitting in utterly contentment, I see men trotting through the forest. Men from a city, elegant, straight backs, in a confident manner they move in a backwash. All dressed in a dark trench-coat; it are deer on their way to the creek right behind us. Not very special when you let your thoughts deepen, but in times of Corona where everyone needs to stay inside, I think it wondrous to have this freedom. For the fourth week our live is outside, in a bubble of comfort and insights. We are all marionettes, so far evolved -a thought we love to address to ourselves- that we have become totally dependent to the hands that moves us. Like deer, we are in search among buildings, we seek that what feed us.

Walls have the tendency to keep one inside. To have us do tasks and jobs and undertakings which can not wait. Inside is making the brain busy and occupied.

Nature provides with openness, possibilities, creativity and silence.

The silence. When you think of it, can you answer to yourself when it was truly quiet? No sound is absence of any noise and that is rare. No television while eating breakfast in a hotel or restaurant. No radio. No voices. No humming of any machine, refrigerator, air conditioning unit nor redundant string cutter, leaf blower, washing machine. It is so quiet that a needle pulled through a piece of fabric can be heard.