Slow (for #SAND2018)

Note to readers:  In this era, your attention is a valuable commodity- everyone wants it. Mostly to monetize it. It's a radical act to choose an attentive life, a life of nuance. This was written for the Science and NonDuality (SAND) summer gathering in July of 2018, where very attentive people gather to experience and investigate beingness and the nature of reality.---SLOWThe pulsation between fine parsingand taking in the wholenessfirst you are a nanoscope - then Hubble in the deep fieldnow splitting hairs splitting atoms splitting momentsthen the mystery again, the soft Sufi gaze into the space betweenEvery day you wake upHave you noticed the transition from sleep to wakeThe moment before you remember that you have a bodyWhen your dreams are rolling fast away to distant plainsFading to innocenceWaking up isn’t a single movementIt is a series of notes and flavorsExpand it and feel the tone inside the toneEveryday you take your teaUsually in a gulp while editing, half presentUntil one day amid the earthenware pot the straw mat the woven cloth the small white flowerYou feel the tea on your tongueits temperature its roundness its overt flavorthen the undertone or bitterness or the soil it was grown innotice it moving through the your pipes and out to the blood stream to the edges of the skin where it dilates and plumpsand you are so enthralledyou waitbefore taking the next sipEvery day you have a mealChemAg would have you taste nothingSmother you in sugar to mask what is not-foodThen sitting at a farmhouse table in the rolling countrysideYou might be given a teaspoon of buckwheat honey with real butter and fatgrained salt on thick dark breadAnd the mouth is confused and intrigued at the strange densityOr perhaps someone grates fresh ginger, grinds mint from the garden into chilled seltzer and the bite of it is a real taste but somehow you have forgotten these plants and the way they really areAnd even this fine presencing:they will cut an animal into parts and grind its flesh in a grinder and you will eat its muscle and blood and somehow not taste the sufferingEveryday you make loveDo you notice the rapid swell of her lipsOf the exact texture of his sweatOr how the pupils dilate when you are being welcomed to the inner worldHow the breath and cry rise and fall differently depending on the time of day and the weatherHow her walls change their grip and viscosity on the full moonThe many many moods of the lowing moanAttention is like this:The Sami People of northernmost europe have 300 different words concerning snowThe Hawaiʻi maoli name 108 kinds of blood relatives in their Ohana LalaSanskrit has 96 words for loveThe insect and bird orchestra of the Umbrian countryside in July sounds a perfect C chord across 2 octavesOne moment the air is outside of you and then it is inside and is you and for a fraction of a fraction of a second it is neitherand you notice that tooUnattended, the pace of this world will bludgeon the senses and dull our perceptionsIt will always choose the butterfly over the mothIt will beat us with slogans and simplified argumentsIt will insist that there are “sides”A life of nuanceWon’t come gift wrapped by cultureNuance takes timeSubtlety takes timeNoticing takes timeConversations that dance across traumas and tease out conditioningUntil we are able to have both the heart soft and our choices freeThese take timeIt is a deliberate harvest of yesIt is a choosingyes to this rich roll around in the field of manifest matteryes yes yes to this romp with shaktiShe that invites you to slow celebration, to wonder and ongoing aweTo these infinite flavors of the onelooking back at the one