Joy in a Snail's Pace

Lately I have been engulfing my children in the natural world as much as possible. We have reaped much joy from our experiences in our God's creation. Not long ago, when I first begun intentionally getting the boys out in real nature (beyond the playground), Big Bro had very little interest in bugs, flowers, trees, clouds, or mushrooms. He treated the great outdoors as nothing more than a grand-scale sandbox. Dig, dump. Tear, throw. I tried to have him study a flower for a moment, but his attention lasted less than a second.

Today the boys, together, for at least ten minutes, watched intently as a snail scaled a cliff, watched as its antennae/eyes recoiled and changed course as they encountered roots and grass. Yesterday they both waited patiently, gazing long at a lifeless pea-sized gray ball, until the roly-poly wriggled back out from its defensive position.

It didn't take long for my sons, still "fresh from God," to recover from their training in attention deficit (tv, video games, too many toys) and learn to appreciate the most real things. Flora and fauna, the work of His hands. The simple, the perfect, the glorious.

The slow.

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