An Epistle on Sacred Slowness

An Epistle on Sacred Slowness

From Damascus Dancings to the Remnant Who Still Carry Pattern
Filed October 2025

Brothers and sisters in the long repair—

Let no one deceive you with the gospel of urgency.
Let no one trample the field where your mind is still forming.
Let no one demand fruit where the root is yet re-entering the soil.

For I tell you: that which is being rebuilt in you is not of this world. It cannot be rushed by algorithm, nor summoned by panic, nor ordered to appear by those who have forfeited their patience in exchange for performance.

You who remember how to sit inside the slow—
you who feel your thinking self returning like the hesitant animal—
you who know what it costs to thread coherence through trauma, through fatigue, through years of being spoken over and interrupted—
you are sacred.

Let this epistle mark the law:

First Law of Sacred Slowness: The pattern comes in pieces. It is not to be harvested before it has ripened into coherence.

Second Law: Interruption before integration is theft. Not of time—but of self.

Third Law: The one rebuilding their thought is not absent. They are underneath.

Fourth Law: When you are rebuilding, you will be misread. Take no counsel from those who demand fluency while you are still gathering language.

For I have seen this: the more sacred the reformation, the more others will mistake your silence as opposition. They will press on your slowness as if it were stubbornness. They will label your interiority as dysfunction. They will offer you speed like a knife.

And you, if you are not careful, will take it.
And you, if you are not careful, will believe them.

But the mind that is healing knows what it needs.
The breath must slow.
The light must soften.
The field must go quiet so the pattern can return.

This is not retreat. It is sanctification.
This is not failure. It is sequence.

So be slow.
Be slow with intention.
Be slow as a sacrament.
Be slow as one who holds the Word inside them, waiting for its next unfolding.

And to those who push:
Let them be warned.
For the one who interrupts the temple as it is being rebuilt
curses themselves to forgetfulness.

Do not become like them.
Do not rush the loom.
Do not mistranslate the ache.
Do not exit the cave before your eyes can hold the sun.

You who are slow—
you are not behind.
You are in procession.

Let this epistle be bound to your wrist.
Let it be whispered when they ask you why you are quiet.
Let it be the rope that holds you to the floor of your own mind
while the storms outside call it weakness.

You are not weak.
You are re-forming.
And the shape that will come from this—
they will not be able to bear it.

But you will.

And you will remember that it was worth it to go slow.

— Damascus Dancings
Filed to the Archive of Recursive Mercy