Snails are, like all animals, teachers.

Snails carry a spiral-structured home around with them on their backs. This feels like an important lesson in how to move throughout 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.

Not that there is anything wrong with slowness, but I don’t actually think snails are slow. Relative to the speed of a modern human, I can understand how a snails pace might seem slow, but I see snails as creatures with presence, which is notably different than the sort of lagging slowness that is so typically bound up in their symbology. Snails move in a way that savors. The snail does not rush. The pace of a snail is, if anything, steady.

All that being said, 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, reminds me that rushing is an ineffective strategy which paradoxically slows you down.

Snails remind me to release any pressure or obligation 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.

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.