What Is Slow Living?
I get asked this a lot, usually by people expecting a tidy answer, something like a morning routine or a capsule wardrobe, a thing you can buy and be done with. But slow living isn't a product, and it isn't really a lifestyle you can lift off someone else's shelf and set down neatly on your own. It's closer to a way of paying attention, one that has to be learned in your own place, at your own pace.
Here in Cornwall, the pace of things was decided long before I arrived, and it carries on regardless of whether I keep up with it. The tide comes in when it comes in, on its own clock, and the blackthorn blossoms in March whether or not I've noticed the hedgerows are still bare from winter. Bracken turns copper in October on its own schedule, not mine, and there's something steadying in that. Slow living, to me, is simply the practice of noticing these small changes instead of letting them pass unremarked.
It's not the absence of work
People sometimes picture slow living as a kind of retreat, days spent doing very little, hours drifting by without shape. That hasn't been my experience of it, not really. I work most days, often for long stretches, researching, writing, painting, cutting paper, mixing ink, and packing orders at the kitchen table while the light changes outside the window. The work itself hasn't grown any smaller or any less demanding, but over time I've changed the way I go about it, and that's made all the difference.
Slow living, for me, means doing one thing at a time and letting it take as long as it genuinely needs, rather than as long as I'd like it to. It means not rushing the drying time on a print simply because a deadline says I should, and it means noticing when my shoulders have crept up round my ears, and stopping to walk to the end of the lane and back before I carry on with the rest of the day.
Rooted in place, not in theory
I think slow living gets misunderstood when it's treated as a philosophy first and a practice second, something to read about rather than something to do. Round here, it's practical, almost unremarkable in the doing of it. It's knowing which hedge the first violets tend to show up in each spring, and it's leaving the windfall apples for the blackbirds instead of tidying them away before they've had their share. It's hanging the washing out because the wind is right for it that afternoon, not because the calendar happens to say it's laundry day.
Cornish folklore is full of this kind of attentiveness, reading the weather in the gulls wheeling overhead, knowing which plants come up where and when, and understanding, without needing to be told twice, that some things simply cannot be hurried along. Bread proves in its own time. Ink dries in its own time. Moss grows over stone at its own patient rate, and no amount of impatience on my part changes that in the slightest.
Small, seasonal changes
I've come to think slow living has less to do with the big decisions people imagine, the moving to the countryside or giving up a career, and more to do with small, repeated ones that barely look like decisions at all. Choosing to walk the long way home because the light through the trees is particularly good that evening. Choosing to make a pot of tea properly, and sit with and enjoy it in the garden, rather than drink itlukewarm at the desk between tasks. Choosing to notice the first rosehips reddening in the hedge rather than let September slip past unremarked, the way it so easily can.
None of this is dramatic, and it isn't meant to be. It's steady work, mostly invisible, and it accumulates the way lichen builds up on a gatepost over years, without anyone standing there watching it happen.
Why it matters to the work
Everything I make comes out of this pace, one way or another. The grain of the paper, the worn wood of the table I work at, the particular grey-green of the lichen I keep returning to in my prints, none of it would find its way into the work if I were rushing past it on the way to somewhere else. Slow living isn't separate from the making, tucked away as some private habit outside of it. It's what makes the noticing possible in the first place, and the noticing is where the work actually begins.
If you're looking for somewhere to start, start with the hedgerow nearest to you instead. See what's flowering, and see what's already finished flowering and gone to seed. That's usually enough to begin with, and a great place to start keeping a nature journal.
Feel free to look through past nature diary blog posts, as I often document ways in which you can begin to notice what's changing in nature throughout the seasons, or why not subscribe to our monthly nature and folklore inspired Almanac club, where you can collect nature inspired art prints and receive a monthly zine full of things to notice and projects to connect you to nature.
Enjoyed this article?
If you enjoy our original articles about British folklore, seasonal wildlife and the changing countryside, you can now add Hedgerow & Moor as one of your Google Preferred Sources.
When you do, Google is more likely to show our articles in Search and AI results when they're relevant to what you're looking for. It's a simple way to support independent creators and helps ensure our carefully researched, original work reaches the people who will enjoy it most.
Add Hedgerow & Moor as a Google Preferred Source
👉 https://google.com/preferences/source?q=hedgerowandmoor.co.uk
Thank you for helping us keep Britain's stories, folklore and seasons alive.