Slow Dancing

The house is completely silent. Every member of this twelve-member (give or take, depending on the day) extended family is gone. Except for me. I look up, and the two (sparkling) picture windows break the scenery in half, all green grass and brown corn stalks covering newly planted beans below, and all bright, blue sky above. Off to the right, a flowerbed of stocky yellow and red and green and blue and silver farm implements takes in sun. Robert is off at the Church Work Day, happily busy, doing whatever can be done with a broken back newly healed, and I am home, monitoring heart flutters and waiting for the ache in the guts to die away with the gradual passing of the chemo drugs from my body. After waking up at 4, I’ve already had one nap, possibly the first of several. It’s an inside day.

I love inside days. When Robert has one of these, he makes sure he is productive, working resolutely on another article for the Anabaptist Witness or catching up on emails and reports. And he makes sure that there are not many inside days for him. Off he goes, at the drop of a hat, to find people to engage, tools to buy, widows to help. While I stay home. And think. And look at metal flowers out my window. And write. My best thoughts come on long walks and inside days.

I used to think it was only introverts that needed slow time. I was wrong. I was over helping Janey unpack boxes of kitchen stuff, and she showed me a slip of paper she’d found on the floor somewhere and tacked on the frig. It says: “You have a slow and unhurried natural rhythm.” She had both fists in the air, exclaiming YES! through clenched teeth in her emphatic, Janey way. Some Chinese fortune teller finally understood her! I always assumed that with all her energy and get-up-and-go she would be moving fast all the time. But she isn’t. Not when she’s wiping a counter, or putting things away, or deciding what to fix for dinner, or worst of all, staining stairs. (How was she to know that the faster you stain, the better it turns out?) It frustrates her, and frustrates me, to be rushed. It frustrates our husbands when we tangle things up with our slowness. Sigh.

It also makes me think of my friend Kath’s dance recital. She’s in her forties and has a grandkid. But she was up there on stage, dancing slow with

three other moms. Making grace. The older kids’ performances were a treat, jazz, dub step, break dance—I LOVE that stuff--but what I remember best is the two-year-old little girl right at the beginning, with her light brown curls, and her bright ruddy cheeks and her gold angel wings taped on her back with shiny gold duct tape. She was the daughter of one of the teachers. She kept looking intently up at her mom, trying to get the hand motions right, and not getting them right, and not needing to, because she was a complete, miniature dance just in her own little self. And it made me think that being can be just as beautiful as doing, and inside days are good days for just being, and as the blinded Milton said, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”