To keep our feet on the ground is to find wholeness in our lives. We bring spirit down in the world of soul to be embodied, to work, to be of benefit. At the same times we go the other way, too, bringing world up toward spirit, ennobling the kitchen and the freeway. Integrity is active, a practice concerned with motion, connection, and struggle. It does not just go by the rules. In the great silence, integrity listens for the true course. This means that integrity is slow. It allows us to feel the anxiety of events developing, finding their shape; it does not rush through the time of growth, and enjoys the moment before the task is complete.
From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows... a faster connection palpably diminishes our ability to experience the richness of the physical world: A person texting her friends or riding on a bullet train is connected very quickly to her ends, but in doing so, she skips over the immensely complex terrain that lies between those two points... the faster we travel, the more intensely we feel our lack of relationship with the land we traverse.