Pinwheel Living

I'm such a weakling at Hobby Lobby.  I come home with weird things like ceramic frogs and 5-foot silk sunflowers.  The other day I came home with a giant, yellow-polka-dotted pinwheel that I promptly stuck in my just-emerging but still dead-looking perennial bed.  It's one of those things, like plastic pink flamingos or mutant butterflies clinging to vinyl siding, that make you wonder why you're smiling. 

A pinwheel can only do two things.  It can be still and it can move.  It's more exciting to watch when it's moving, and I can look at life that way.  Spinning-pinwheel vision.  Accomplishments, activity, progress.  I always end up knocking my head into some hard wall of wisdom that says, slow down for pete sakes.  Be still.  Be. 

But Thomas Kelly, a long ago Quaker who spoke the language my heart speaks, told me I can have both. 

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once.  On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs.  But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to diving breathings.
-Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

He's not talking about alternating between spinning and stillness, depending on the speed of wind.  The secret is "simultaneity."  It's Moses holding the staff and Joshua fighting the battle all at once.  It's me making dinner, filling out the grocery list, and refereeing an argument,  while my heart is beating in the tempo of worship. 

Stillness undergirding the speed of life.