Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Sarton isn’t romanticizing dirt; she’s staging a quiet revolt against the tempo of modern life. The opening phrase, “Everything that slows us down,” reads like a diagnosis of a culture addicted to acceleration. In her hands, patience isn’t a personality trait, it’s a discipline imposed from the outside - by seasons, weather, soil that won’t be bullied. That’s the subtext: we keep mistaking speed for agency, when so much of being alive is negotiated on nature’s timetable.

The line “sets us back” is doing sly work. It admits that slowing down can feel like failure, like losing ground in the social economy of productivity. Sarton flips that shame into a corrective. To be “set back into the slow circles of nature” is to be returned to a more honest clock: cyclical rather than linear, repetitive rather than ladder-climbing. Gardening becomes practice in accepting limits, uncertainty, and delayed gratification - the exact opposite of the instant-feedback world.

Calling it “an instrument of grace” adds a spiritual voltage without preaching. Grace is unearned, received rather than achieved; “instrument” suggests something you pick up and use, a tool that trains the hands and, by extension, the self. For a poet writing in a century defined by mechanization, war, and the shrinking of solitude, the garden is less a hobby than a counter-program: a space where attention is rehabilitated and the ego learns to cooperate with forces it cannot command.