1.Snails are, like all animals, teachers.
2. Snails carry a spiral-structured home around with them on their backs. This feels like an important lesson in how to move through the world as your own home. It also speaks to the importance of the material body, to concrete reality, to the physical as not just metaphor.
3. Not that there is anything wrong with slowness, but I don’t actually think snails are that slow. Relative to the speed of more agile animals or the modern human, I of course can see how a snails pace has come to be synonymous with a lagging slowness. But more than any other descriptor, what I love about the snail is its quality of presence. Snails move in a way that savors. The snail does not rush. The pace of a snail is, if anything, steady.
Why Snails?
4. That aside, so much of what I love about snails really does have to do with their sense of timing. The snail reminds me to release illusions of urgency, to return to the present. The snail reminds me that rushing is an ineffective strategy, one that typically delays rather than hurries.
5. Snails remind me that I am not obliged to explain things in words. Snails offer up a different kind of language. They remind me that I need not find and articulate some concise, singular, unchanging qualification as to why I love snails.
6. Ultimately, I’m not completely certain why snails. Regardless of why snails speak to me, they do. I’d like to think that is enough.