I Am the Tortoise

In the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, I would cast myself as the Tortoise. I like to think of that character from Aesop's fable, because in other contexts I am simply slow, even pokey - without the sense that it has any redeeming qualities. “Slowly does it every time!” Tortoise said.
Or as Gen-la said at the last teaching on Medicine Buddha, we want a practice like the Fraser (the big river that runs near Vancouver), flowing steadily, not a practice like a waterfall. Some day I'd like my spiritual practice to be like the Columbia, the mighty river that  flows through Washington State, becoming the border with Oregon before flowing to the Pacific. If you've been going to a Dharma Center for a while, I'm sure you've seen practitioners who gush enthusiastically about Buddhism and then disappear after a few months. So sad.

There are a lot of analogies in Buddhism about gardening: For example, we plant seeds that will ripen as Dharma realizations. Milarepa encouraged us to be "Dharma farmers":

You are a farmer of this life,
But I am a farmer of future lives.
If you examine carefully, you will see
Who receives more benefit.

Sometimes we push too hard - and push ourselves right off the path. It's like tugging upward at a small sprout, and inadvertently pulling it out of the ground.

I tend to be lazy, so cancer has been good for my spiritual practice - it's been giving me a kick in the pants, pushing me to get a move on - adding a bit of Hare's urgency. Not that I would wish cancer on anyone. But it is a constant reminder that I don't have forever. I love that Dharma has taught me how to make use of everything that comes my way, and how to turn things that are normally thought of as bad into something good. Which is also an emptiness teaching - the situation is not inherently anything - it's what your mind makes of it. More on that some other time; in the meantime, I highly recommend reading Eight Steps to Happiness.