“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” - Ferris Bueller
Ferris reminds us of this motto as he breaks the 4th wall in the eponymous 80’s classic. Who knew how much this statement would resonate 30 something years later in the 21st century where our lives are inextricably connected to social media, cell phones, and computers? We are always ON. We are always moving fast. And it’s killing us. We are missing everything! Everything that matters anyway (No, someone’s IG post about their brunch doesn’t fucking matter).
Even though we may be sitting still while using these platforms, our minds, and eyes, are moving a million miles a millisecond. Nature didn’t design us to do this. Although we are masters of adaptation (a good example is engineering our environment to suit us), there are certain experiences that our human bodies, designed by many, many eons of evolution, are not designed to handle at such fast rates of speed. Like traveling across the world in 20 hours. OR, processing millions of gigabytes of data at warp speed. Or sifting through 8,000 IG posts of someone’s stupid brunch. We are multitasking until our brains are ready to explode. Maybe, if our species is able to out-survive our destructive ways, successive generations will evolve and adapt better than us. Who can say.
Last week’s new moon had me in a funk. Usually I love the new moon. It's a new beginning, a start of a cycle, and a time to set intentions. Well, out of necessity, because work was a shitshow and because of whatever weird energy that has been shifting around us (pretty much everyone I interacted with had similar “shit” weeks), my intention was to slow down. So far in June, I went on a motorcycle campout for a weekend, rode 700 miles through the Catskills, came back to teach a bunch of yoga classes, all while doing regular life stuff, and dealing with a heavy lift of intense biological analyses at work. It’s all good, but it’s taxing… It’s currently mid-June and nothing felt like it was going to slow down anytime soon. So when the hell was I gonna “slow down and smell the roses?” Trust me--I wanted to. It’s literally wild rose season and the air is thick with that ephemeral heart medicine and I wanted SO bad to be out in it and enjoying it. But I wasn’t. I was in a miserable mood. Feeling pulled in 80 directions so that everything I was doing was being diluted because I didn’t have enough energy to give any one thing my all.
Instead of doors opening by doing a million things and moving fast and working hard, doors were closing. Mother nature was closing those doors too because no matter how much you want to change outside forces, she ain’t gonna wait around for your schedule to free up. The roses will bloom and go by. Spring will turn into summer and so forth.
Wake up, Chrissy. Connect and expand--remember your mantra? Yeah, do that.
Anyways, I was in a daze until Saturday morning I began to feel the tension release from my heart chakra...and my shoulder blades. I worked in my garden, I went foraging for wild rose with my dog (well, she just ate grass and chased squirrels), and I went to the beach and replenished those salts and trace minerals our bodies so desperately need and don’t get enough of. I started to feel more human again. Like a more connected human. I also set boundaries for myself. I was tired and worn out and I said no to plans even though I felt obligated to do what I was expected to do. But, in order to slow down and be authentic, I had to do what my mind and body asked. I needed to slow down and rest. So I did. Everything really IS temporary. So the tension I felt last week was bound to shift, even if it didn’t seem like it.
On Sunday I was out in western Mass for my herbal class and that definitely provided much needed time to slow down. It was hot, so slowing down was absolutely necessary. But, more than that, having limited phone reception, sitting in nature and observing the landscape ecology supporting the plants we worked with, and just BEING, was the heart tonic I needed. Stagnant energy began to move as I laid in the grass under a wild rose bush. Bees buzzing, butterflies fluttering by...bucolic New England at her finest.
As we approach summer solstice, which is my favorite time of year, despite some of the weird shifting energy as of late, I keep my intention of slowing down close to my heart. Receptiveness only comes when we stop and take a look around. Just like Ferris advised. When we slow down, we can hear the whispers encouraging us to open the doors rather than us zipping by at light speed slamming them all shut.
Namaste and Happy Solstice! <3