Time and Timelessness

A raven said to me, "Don't forget this hiking is your meditation. Some people need to move to be still." Then he asked me, "What anchors you to time?" And I thought, "Shame brings me back to time; to guilt; to will in a degrading attempt to prevent dissipation." To create requires timelessness. To love requires space, a suspension of self-awareness. I am now tired, sleepy, but I know these things. The fear of wasting time, by definition, disappears in the open field. Without time, there is no measure, no comparison. It is never too late. You can throw your arms around the people you miss, you can ask why and what and listen. The veil lifts, the barrier melts, the pathology becomes meaningless. You can write with your wrinkles and sound like youth because there is no measure. Presence is the sound of youth to us who are anchored in time, when really it is the naked sound, unembellished, unselfconscious, unaware of anything but the muscularity and breeze of it. Those words like walking in the mountains, watching moist dust settle among desert volcanoes, seeing the mossy underbelly of the foothills in a silver-plated light thrown from somewhere behind a sprawling thunderhead. There is no time in that view, the bounce of feet on the rocks, the stray drops grazing a cheek. And then a bolt of lightning over Two Peaks sparks the thought, "maybe if I get hit it'll knock me out of time forever and my eyes will blaze with an indescribable fire." And then the next thought, "But will it hurt?"