The Slow Food movement is designed to counter fast food. The emphasis is on taking your time, taking care, and savoring the cooking and the taste of the dish.
I feel like I am the Slow Food of entertainment. I look at things like Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, and the like, and while I get it, it’s just not me. I like to consider what I write, edit what I post. I like to reminisce about the past, ponder ideas, take my time.
What is popular is immediacy, momentary distraction, disposable fun. I’m not judging it; I am often a consumer of it. I’m just realizing it’s not me.
Can it be? Can I balance my long-distance pace with a sprinter’s burst? Should I?
I’m probably going to try. I have a desire to be noticed, to be hot, to go viral. But I know it’s going to take a lot of learning to become something I am not.
This is the first entry in my book. You will see that the left side has a quote from Thoreau, and the right hand side explains the connection of his ideas to Taoism. It also talks of a Seeker, a person looking to live a meaningful, balanced and creative life.
Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow out of life, to live so sturdily as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it. Or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it.
Tao
Thoreau begins his quest by radically simplifying his world. Moving to a cabin in the woods enables him to identify distractions and illusions. Being alone helps him strip his life down to find out what is important and true in the hopes of discovering a path that has meaning and value.
Realistically, most of us cannot separate from society. Still, Thoreau teaches the Seeker to identify parts of life that drain our energy, hold us back, and trip us up.
This is what he means by fronting “the essential facts of life.” What is truly important? What desires are part of my path, and which pull me away from it? Thoreau and Taoism propose a radical freedom from distracting and destructive thinking, mindsets and actions.
I would love to hear what you think about these ideas! Leave a comment.
Blue Heron
standing in the shallows:
Stick legs
Knot knees
Twig toes
Do you always have one leg raised
Or is that the way I want to picture you?
The way your body curves
Into your long neck
Curls into your head
Pointing with your beak.
Immobile elegance
Poised to strike
Pierce
Capture
Eat
Immobile elegance
Still
Outside of time
Do you always fly by yourself?
You are solitary
But
The steady, slow wing pace
Makes me think you are flying in place
Makes me think you don’t know alone
When you are above me
You are so many things
A seamless assembly of geometry
Cylindrical
Linear
Curved
Body
Legs
Wings
Straight and curling
Never bent or crooked
You are dignity
Except that one time:
I surprise you in the small pond
So close to the trail
My hiker quiet feet don’t warn you
Anna’s dog-pad paws hush on the packed dirt
You jump up, water thunder wing crash
But
The trees are close around you
The escape angle steep
Up
You labor, heavy strokes
Slap the air
Unsteadily ascend
Somehow find a hole in the canopy
Escape from me
With my hand reached out toward you
Trying to bring you back
And
It’s too late let to tell you that I love you
This is a poem that came from a student mistake, writing “once of hope” instead of “ounce of hope.”
How an ounce of hope
Becomes a once of hope
That once of hope lasts to this day
Is in these words
Is in every page I've written
This endless dream
Started with a pencil
Scribbling inside the blue lines
On them
Across them
This true belief
Belied by reality
Given the smallest sustenance
10 dollars
Poems in print
Stories imprinted in the cloud
Yet the once of hope endures
It was hoped so strong
Multiplying from the ounce of hope
It once came from
You probably are thinking of Sally, Charlie’s well-known sister. But what you don’t know is that there is another: Charlene Brown.
Charlie Brown’s father tried to hide it, but his son was a terrible disappointment to him. He never knew a young person could be so anxious and so bad a everything. It was clear right away that Charlie was destined to be a failure. And his father felt helpless to do anything about it.
Until he came upon the obvious solution: start a second family. Mr. Brown created the identity “Johnny Teal”, and found a woman on the internet. Soon they were married, and his secret wife gave birth to a girl. They named her Charlene, and they raised her to be the exact opposite of the half-brother she would never know.
Charlene excelled at everything Charlie failed at. She became a feared hitter in baseball, and a fearsome pitcher. She was dominant in her relationship with her peers, and they respected her to the utmost, while craving her attention and approval. And as far as successfully kicking a football, well, we’ll let this excerpt from Charlene Brown, the first nine years tell that story:
Charlene takes two steps back and one to her left. Her friend Lou von Furr calmly places the football on the ground, puts his finger on the puckered tip of the ball, and turns the laces away. Her eyes raise to the target, then drop to the ball. Charlene Brown stutter steps, planting her left foot as her right leg swings back. Her foot punches through the ball, and her legs scissor up as air explodes from her mouth. She lands, slightly bent, so she is the same height as Lou coming up from his crouch. They end up with arms around each other as, perfect again, the ball flips high through the uprights.
From the sideline, Charlene’s father, pride shining on his face, can’t contain his excitement, exclaiming, “Whhoomp wooowhomp waaaaaahh wont want woooooooh!”
All of Mr. Brown’s hopes for the future are focused on his secret daughter. He knows that Charlie will live at home forever, claiming to be a competitive esports gamer while leaching off his parents. Charlene promises the possibility of success and riches, or at least not endless disappointment.
When I decided to launch this website, Henry David Thoreau had a talk with me. He reminded me of a time he had three pieces of limestone on his desk, and became “terrified” when he realized he had to dust them every day, so he “threw them out the window in disgust.”
His punch line was: “It’s best to avoid the beginning of evil.”
Thoreau is showing his sense of humor with some hyperbole, but his point is strong: consider the new objects and projects that you take on carefully, and think about the amount of work involved in maintaining them.
Metaphorically, Thoreau’s limestone represents any task or duty that demands our attention and work. As I say in Tao of Thoreau, when we start something new, we need to be “ready to bring the energy and focus required.” I thought about this a lot as I designed bozbozeman.com.
I’m launching this site at the end of the school year, which can be a stressful and exhausting time. For this blog to succeed, I need to produce and post content so people who like it will keep coming back. I need to find creative ways to promote it so that it grows. This is a lot of work; moreover, it is work that I will have to sustain for a long time for this site to become successful.
Then I realized something, so I said this back to Thoreau: “The limestone was decoration. You didn’t want to waste your time on something you didn’t have to. Writing is something I want to do. And with a website, other people can read my work, which has always been my goal.”
I didn’t see Lao-Tzu there until he said, “That’s right.” I looked at him, and he spoke in that calm voice, echoing with centuries of wisdom: “Do you work and step back. The only path to serenity.”
Thoreau didn’t have anything to say to that, so I guess I have avoided the beginning of evil.
Mark Bozeman 