Haibun: Our Pace
Climbing Picacho Peak, it was as if the cacti were everywhere. Up the mountainside and through the valley, all there was was cacti, most had flowers. So thousands of cacti lead to tens of thousands of flowers. It was a reality for miles.
It is easy to imagine a time, not long ago in the scope of human history, where this desert and all these cacti was literally everything to a person native to this soil. The three hundred year growth of a cactus, 90 years for just an arm, was how things grew. Maybe a flash flood was the idea of fast, but the markers of speed and time in this desert were so much slower.
Now we have other things to mark our time. We have our phones to push us, we have Twitter and Instagram to give us a faster way of life. We have terabytes of information delivered in nanoseconds to interrupt and distract us. But at the root of it all, we have each other, individually and as a culture(s), to drive and push and set our pace faster and faster. Needless to say, the paradigm of how things unfold and happen were different when it was the cacti, their flowers, and the sun to set the pace of things.
So, with intention, we can head off on a trail with cacti or trees or even prairie grass, just so we can each reset the pace, to go by the time set by nature instead of by our own ambitions or the ambitions of profit and fame. We can reset our clocks with no TV remote or phone nearby to distract us back into the hectic.
where flowers confide, reside
heat no longer hides
