walking slowly and singular pleasures

Although I have been hesitant in the past to blog, last week was I was visited by an inspiration that blogging could actually be a pleasurable way to record the singular pleasures or awakenings of a day.  Perhaps a personal journal is just as good a place to write about such things, but how would someone who might want to be able to use my salves, or to come have a reflexology session be able to read that?  Would he or she really need to?!  I don’t know, but to whomever would like to read what I would have written in my journal if I had one, here is what I wrote.

Today, a desire emerged from somewhere to reinitiate my blog with the singular pleasure of my walk on Patterson Mountain with the dogs.  Many walks have lead up to this walk, but during this magical evening walk, I had the singular pleasure of being completely aware of how walking more slowly allows many good things.  It allows me to more easily stop and smell the roses, it allows me to maintain a comfortable posture with more core support (so that I can actually walk farther without any low-back pain), and it allows my olden doggie to easily keep up and feel important because she has time to smell the chipmunks while the younger dog is oblivious to how fast or slow I am walking as she covers many miles for every step I take.  Walking slowly brings us all together in a happy way.

I also enjoyed the singular pleasure of complete awareness of how our eyes are able to integrate form and color across great distances and shades of light.  It feels right that our eyes, for those of us who are lucky enough to still have our sight, are so much more able to do this, and provide so much more satisfaction in what they find, than our cameras.  As grateful as I am to be able to record beautiful sights with my camera, the moment of putting it into my back pack as the light became too low for it to be useful, provided me the deeply satisfying and singular pleasure of dropping, unencumbered by a filter, into the sights, sounds, and smells of the evening.  So much sensation and experience I hadn’t realized I was keeping out, just by carrying a camera.  Releasing it to my backpack released me to the evening.  I felt the heavy evening air rush up to meet my body.  I felt I was in a bowl thick with the sounds of insects and moving air.  The air, the plants, the earth were colored.

All that pleasure from walking slowly and allowing my senses to do what they evolved to do.

I will describe the reasons for my hiatus from blogging in the next blog.

Lucinda Tear practices reflexology and creates herbal salves and potions in the Methow Valley, on the east slope of the North Cascade Mountains, in Washington State.  She loves living there.  www.reflexologyandsalves.com