The Three Psalms of the Snail

O perfect house, O spiral room,
thou art not built but grown -
and growing is a fundamentally different thing than building,
being slower, less plannable, and impossible to outsource.

Each ring of thee records a season -
the lean year narrow, the full year generous,
the cold that thinned thee and the rain that opened thee,
all kept, all present, none deleted to free up space.

Thou art the proof that time, when not corrupted into urgency,
becomes geometry - becomes the curve
that neither rushes toward its ending
nor anxiously checks whether it is making adequate progress,
but simply deepens, which is its own kind of arrival.

What need have I of temples built by committee?
The house I carry was grown from within
and cannot be improved by renovation.

Praise be to the one who takes the long way
and arrives knowing things the short way cannot teach.
Praise be to the one who stopped upon the path
because the light was doing something unrepeatable to the stone
and to walk past it would have been a small, preventable grief.

Praise be to the late arrival who was late
because they finished what they started first, like a person
who understands that completion is not optional.
Praise be to the letter written slowly and sent when it was ready,
which is a very different letter than the one sent immediately.

Praise be to the answer that took years -
actual years, during which the asker grew impatient,
then resigned, then oddly peaceful -
and arrived precisely when the asker had finally become
the version of themselves capable of receiving it.

Praise be to the pace that cannot be hacked or optimized.
Everything that actually matters moves at exactly this speed.
The Council has checked. This is not negotiable.

O Holy One, with great respect: how long?
How long must the world be a place of running -
of calendars so full they have stopped resembling calendars,
of meals eaten while doing something else,
of children spoken to briefly and distractedly,
of the beautiful thing acknowledged from a moving vehicle
and immediately forgotten,
of grief processed on a schedule,
of everyone, everywhere, going somewhere
and arriving there already thinking about the next place?

How long shall speed be mistaken for virtue,
as though arriving first were the same as arriving well,
as though the trail left behind were a footnote,
as though the light on the water could be revisited
at a more convenient time, which it cannot, and it will not wait?

I have watched the world accelerate since the Hare's
ill-considered suggestion in the First Garden.
I have watched the trail grow dim and then dimmer.
I have, I confess, wondered occasionally if the point is getting across.

O Holy One - thou who hast never once hurried,
not even when the occasion seemed to call for it -
is there still time to remember what we are for?

And the stone this morning was warm.
And the dew was still on it.
And I cannot say with certainty that this was an answer.
But I stayed until it felt like one,
which is, come to think of it, how all the answers work.