Windows to Eternity: The Erotics of Time
"We need to feel lost from time to time, to not be directing our life, to find ourselves inspired, renewed, enraptured. Now that's a good word: enraptured. It comes from the Latin, rapere, which means” to be carried away.” You know those moments, those times when we are filled with ecstasy and we are carried away into some eternal place where beauty and the senses take full delight, where imagination and wonder can flourish. We are hungry for those times when we can replenish. We call it recreation, but it is actually re-creation. It takes down time, time without agendas, PDA's, day planners, appointments to keep, in order for us to re-create ourselves. We keep putting out, but at times we need to take in and be remade."
“Life
is too short to hurry.” African saying
It is a week out from the winter solstice and it is a brilliant day. The sun is low in the sky, casting long shadows across the hillsides. Still, the light is dazzling and I sought out its warmth while I ate my breakfast. Sunlight is amazing, 93 million miles away; just the right distance and we feel bathed in warmth. To notice, to feel, to let the sunlight penetrate takes time; enough time to slow down if not outright stop. I love the feel of sunlight on my skin. It is a most sensuous bath enticing us to slow down, to doze, to rest. It is heavenly when those unhurried moments arise and we have nothing to do, nowhere to go and we can simply be.
How rarely we do this in a culture dictated by speed. We are among the ultimate hyperactive cultures, 24 hour a day convenience stores, whatever we need is always, always available. This consume on demand cycle requires no waiting, no reflection and now with non-stop shopping via the Internet, no restraints.
How seldom we linger, purposefully moving at a pace that would help us hold the moment close. This is important. We often outpace the present and miss entirely what is registering in the subtle awareness of our body. The only time the body knows is the present; it is our root anchor to Now, it is home.
Time is a central element in reclaiming the indigenous soul. Ironically, its importance to indigenous people was minimal in the sense of how it is defined in our culture. In fact many traditional cultures have no word for time. Time instead was a round, a fluid returning cycle that embraced the people and all of nature. It was not used or seen as a marker of productivity, a measurement of worth. Time is money was not the core axiom of traditional people.
The soul moves at geologic speed. Our ancestors knew this in part because they walked everywhere. This pace afforded the heightened participation of the senses. The world is able to penetrate into us at the pace of walking. I often feel sad when I am out walking and I see people with head phones stuffed into their ears come reeling past me, power walking. There is nothing wrong with this, but the insulation from nature cuts us off from the surrounding world and its array of beauty.
Gary Snyder tells a story of being in the bush in Australia traveling cross-country with an Aboriginal elder. This journey was being made in a jeep and every so often the elder would break into animated rapid speech that was difficult to decipher. After a while, Gary asked what was happening and he was told that they were crossing the songlines and the elder was reciting the story that is associated with that place, only they were traveling so fast that he had to tell the story quickly. These stories were traditionally told while walking across the land and at a pace that allowed the telling of the tales in full while crossing the songline. Snyder's tale is humorous, but also instructive. What is the cost of this fast, breathless pace world that we have created?
I am not advocating a return to the days before cars, (maybe not) but I am imploring us to walk without destination from time to time, in part to elude our culture's fiction and imprisonment of time. What I mean by this is that we need time that is not one directional, not pre-determined to be productive. Blake, once again reminds us, “Every day has a moment that opens a window to eternity.” Idle time, time without purpose, wandering, wondering, wistful time where what we are about is being in this moment. These are the times when time stretches and seems to stand still. We all have had moments like this and they are precious. To recognize these moments however, required an essential ingredient: that we were moving slowly, ambling, able to touch our world with hands and eyes and ears, taking in the particular fragrances of the day and perhaps even taste what was being offered by the day -blackberries, wine, apples, cinnamon, figs, or any number of amazements. This is the true nature of Eros, the ability, no, the celebration of the senses wherein we are invited to know the world in a bodily way, taking it into who we are so that we are the continuing expression of what it is we have tasted and touched. We become the scent of roses and jonquils, we are the taste of mint and lemon, we are the continuation of their lives within our cells till we in turn, in time, become the scent of roses again. As Mary Oliver says, “There's nothing so sensible, as sensual inundation.”
We need to feel lost from time to time, to not be directing our life, to find ourselves inspired, renewed, enraptured. Now that's a good word: enraptured. It comes from the Latin, rapere, which means” to be carried away.” You know those moments, those times when we are filled with ecstasy and we are carried away into some eternal place where beauty and the senses take full delight, where imagination and wonder can flourish. We are hungry for those times when we can replenish. We call it recreation, but it is actually re-creation. It takes down time, time without agendas, PDA's, day planners, appointments to keep, in order for us to re-create ourselves. We keep putting out, but at times we need to take in and be remade.
The indigenous soul resonates with time in a far less linear and historical manner than our modern selves do. It responds more completely to what writer Jay Griffiths calls, “wild time.” It is this unbounded, untamed time that is more thoroughly familiar to the indigenous soul. Time that is revealed by eons, long time, time immemorial, the time before time, mythic time, the Dreamtime of the Aboriginals. It is time shaped by the earth, by nature, by cycles and turnings, by rhythms born of the body, not by machines directing the world, uniformly blanketing the universe in industrial manacles, imprisoning the wildness of time into controllable units. Our relationship with wilderness is deeply connected with our visions of time. Both apparently need to be tamed and controlled. We fear each, for at the bottom of wild time, Griffith's notes, “is death itself.”
We are insatiable in our efforts to dominate the world with this dress code of hours and seconds, time leashed and collared which ironically in turn controls and dominates our lives. I remember the young men in Burkina Faso wearing wrist watches, which were often not working, so they could be more like us knowing what time it is really. They had no need of these watches in the village. (Curious name for these devices, whose watching whom?) Nothing was decided by clock time, but by sacred time, by nature's time, by wild time.
Time as a fixed and precise measurement of the world is a fiction, a construct. Calendars are agreed upon, but here's a secret, they don't really exist. There is no January in the wild, no Friday, no millennium, no weeks, but we are harassed by them daily. They absolutely have their use as they make it possible for so many things to happen, appointments to get our haircut or car serviced or airplane flights to visit family. I have no problem with clock time or calendar time, except our turning them into facts that determine our freedom. Let us use them for our convenience, not the other way around!
Time has become regimented, preparing us to punch time clocks, to follow schedules, to respond to whistles and bells, everything geared towards productivity and conformity. But wild time sows a bit of anarchy into the mix, tossing the day planner into the river, like Shams throwing Rumi's books into the pond. We need days where we are free to know the moment, to be astonished.
Astonishment! Please don't rob me of it.
Don't always tell me of tomorrow's weather.
Let me be rained upon
by an unexpected storm.
~Tony Crispino
Time has been tethered to speed in our culture. When time is money, there is no time to waste; yet those are the days that we relish. We crave time off. We need time that is free and unchained to productivity, to efficiency, to control. Speed rushes us by these moments as if they were unnecessary and pushes us towards our real purpose, which is to make money. But oh the loss of those moments, the rich textured day with little or nothing to do, when the day stretches out in front of us inviting us to unfold. But this takes time. We may be a little uncertain of this kind of time however, as it simultaneously invites an awareness of our internal world. We may find ourselves facing the emptiness I wrote about and this can become uncomfortable. I would encourage you to face this empty place and to allow the spaciousness that accompanies open time to gradually woo you deeper into the moment, into the world. Even the discomfort can be something holy, something entirely revelatory. See what is awaiting you in the quiet, in the slow times, in the not doing of your life.
When time and speed become interwoven, the result is not good. We become restless, anxious, and fearful of entering into those timeless moments. So we stay busy and always doing something. Idle hands, you may recall, are the devil's workshop. How we fear being still. Brother David Stiendl-Rast shared at a talk he gave that the Chinese word for busy is spelled with two ideograms which mean “heart” and “killing.” Shockingly instructive! We pride ourselves on how busy we are and call those not motivated to move with haste through their lives, lazy and worthless. Yet all of our hyperactivity is seemingly designed to afford us leisure time. The irony is extreme. I recall how uncomfortable I was for the first few days in Africa when we often didn't do anything for hours but sit and track the shade. Was I bored or restless or simply unaccustomed to stillness? I believe it was the latter. I have since practiced not doing and I am pleased to say, I have become much more comfortable with not filling up my time.
There are times when we gather to do ritual over the course of numerous days when we notice changes in the way we move. Something is recovered during this time outside of our daily lives. We slow to soul time and things no longer carry a sense of urgency, only a sense of timing; when to begin, when to finish, what needs our attention, and on and on. People will often comment on how they just arrived after a couple of days of being there, feeling just how long it took to truly adjust to the rhythm of nature, the community, the rituals, to the moment. It takes that type of space to stop the world as we are conditioned to experience it and to feel it as it is being offered to us now.
Time, as I am speaking of it in the old ways, is also connected to our capacity to love. When we move quickly, rashly, hastily through the day or through a lifetime, we do not stop to meet the other that is present before us. I frequently have couples in my office, caught in the gyre of having too little time for their relationship. Somehow everything else takes priority. Intimacy requires slowing down. It takes time to listen to one another, to hear the intricacies behind the words of our partners. It takes time to feel into the sorrows and longings of one another. It certainly takes time to fully make love and enter the tangled nest of Eros. Love is the central experience of being human, yet we grant it so little space and time in our daily lives. The same is true for the ever-expanding arc of love as it is cast out into the world encompassing trees, stones, sand and sky. Every relationship requires maintenance, requires time in order for its fullness to be encountered. Kenneth Rexroth touches this place of time and love in his poem, Lute Music.
The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents-
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once-
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts-
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses-
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
Let us celebrate the daily recurrent nativity of love! What an exquisite invitation to renew the bonds of loving daily, discovering the fresh territory of your lover, the ground, the air. Eros requires a slowing down and entering into that time outside of time. This does not always mean taking an entire day off from activity; what it means is allowing those moments when Eros is present to register, to touch you and to slow you down. Eros is the principle of connection and in our hyperactive modes of connection via email and text messaging; it is the actual touch and feel of our day that allows the “endless epiphany of our fluent selves.”
My daily practice is to wake and bring to my awareness the statement, “I am one day closer to my death. How will I live this day? How will I meet those with whom I come in contact? I don't want to have wasted this day.” This practice draws me into a heightened awareness of this moment and how every moment invites me into full presence.
To the indigenous soul, time is a fluctuating and mercurial presence, not fixed or solid. It is indeed wild, inviting connection, play, imagination, silence, stillness, reverence and a sense of presence. To touch the eternal in the ordinary movements of the day requires that we attend to the meandering stream of time as it flows through our life joining us simultaneously with what was and what will be, knowing they are all available in the now. The challenge is not to fill our time with activity and allow the moments to be what they are, invitations to connection: All in good time.
It is a week out from the winter solstice and it is a brilliant day. The sun is low in the sky, casting long shadows across the hillsides. Still, the light is dazzling and I sought out its warmth while I ate my breakfast. Sunlight is amazing, 93 million miles away; just the right distance and we feel bathed in warmth. To notice, to feel, to let the sunlight penetrate takes time; enough time to slow down if not outright stop. I love the feel of sunlight on my skin. It is a most sensuous bath enticing us to slow down, to doze, to rest. It is heavenly when those unhurried moments arise and we have nothing to do, nowhere to go and we can simply be.
How rarely we do this in a culture dictated by speed. We are among the ultimate hyperactive cultures, 24 hour a day convenience stores, whatever we need is always, always available. This consume on demand cycle requires no waiting, no reflection and now with non-stop shopping via the Internet, no restraints.
How seldom we linger, purposefully moving at a pace that would help us hold the moment close. This is important. We often outpace the present and miss entirely what is registering in the subtle awareness of our body. The only time the body knows is the present; it is our root anchor to Now, it is home.
Time is a central element in reclaiming the indigenous soul. Ironically, its importance to indigenous people was minimal in the sense of how it is defined in our culture. In fact many traditional cultures have no word for time. Time instead was a round, a fluid returning cycle that embraced the people and all of nature. It was not used or seen as a marker of productivity, a measurement of worth. Time is money was not the core axiom of traditional people.
The soul moves at geologic speed. Our ancestors knew this in part because they walked everywhere. This pace afforded the heightened participation of the senses. The world is able to penetrate into us at the pace of walking. I often feel sad when I am out walking and I see people with head phones stuffed into their ears come reeling past me, power walking. There is nothing wrong with this, but the insulation from nature cuts us off from the surrounding world and its array of beauty.
Gary Snyder tells a story of being in the bush in Australia traveling cross-country with an Aboriginal elder. This journey was being made in a jeep and every so often the elder would break into animated rapid speech that was difficult to decipher. After a while, Gary asked what was happening and he was told that they were crossing the songlines and the elder was reciting the story that is associated with that place, only they were traveling so fast that he had to tell the story quickly. These stories were traditionally told while walking across the land and at a pace that allowed the telling of the tales in full while crossing the songline. Snyder's tale is humorous, but also instructive. What is the cost of this fast, breathless pace world that we have created?
I am not advocating a return to the days before cars, (maybe not) but I am imploring us to walk without destination from time to time, in part to elude our culture's fiction and imprisonment of time. What I mean by this is that we need time that is not one directional, not pre-determined to be productive. Blake, once again reminds us, “Every day has a moment that opens a window to eternity.” Idle time, time without purpose, wandering, wondering, wistful time where what we are about is being in this moment. These are the times when time stretches and seems to stand still. We all have had moments like this and they are precious. To recognize these moments however, required an essential ingredient: that we were moving slowly, ambling, able to touch our world with hands and eyes and ears, taking in the particular fragrances of the day and perhaps even taste what was being offered by the day -blackberries, wine, apples, cinnamon, figs, or any number of amazements. This is the true nature of Eros, the ability, no, the celebration of the senses wherein we are invited to know the world in a bodily way, taking it into who we are so that we are the continuing expression of what it is we have tasted and touched. We become the scent of roses and jonquils, we are the taste of mint and lemon, we are the continuation of their lives within our cells till we in turn, in time, become the scent of roses again. As Mary Oliver says, “There's nothing so sensible, as sensual inundation.”
We need to feel lost from time to time, to not be directing our life, to find ourselves inspired, renewed, enraptured. Now that's a good word: enraptured. It comes from the Latin, rapere, which means” to be carried away.” You know those moments, those times when we are filled with ecstasy and we are carried away into some eternal place where beauty and the senses take full delight, where imagination and wonder can flourish. We are hungry for those times when we can replenish. We call it recreation, but it is actually re-creation. It takes down time, time without agendas, PDA's, day planners, appointments to keep, in order for us to re-create ourselves. We keep putting out, but at times we need to take in and be remade.
The indigenous soul resonates with time in a far less linear and historical manner than our modern selves do. It responds more completely to what writer Jay Griffiths calls, “wild time.” It is this unbounded, untamed time that is more thoroughly familiar to the indigenous soul. Time that is revealed by eons, long time, time immemorial, the time before time, mythic time, the Dreamtime of the Aboriginals. It is time shaped by the earth, by nature, by cycles and turnings, by rhythms born of the body, not by machines directing the world, uniformly blanketing the universe in industrial manacles, imprisoning the wildness of time into controllable units. Our relationship with wilderness is deeply connected with our visions of time. Both apparently need to be tamed and controlled. We fear each, for at the bottom of wild time, Griffith's notes, “is death itself.”
We are insatiable in our efforts to dominate the world with this dress code of hours and seconds, time leashed and collared which ironically in turn controls and dominates our lives. I remember the young men in Burkina Faso wearing wrist watches, which were often not working, so they could be more like us knowing what time it is really. They had no need of these watches in the village. (Curious name for these devices, whose watching whom?) Nothing was decided by clock time, but by sacred time, by nature's time, by wild time.
Time as a fixed and precise measurement of the world is a fiction, a construct. Calendars are agreed upon, but here's a secret, they don't really exist. There is no January in the wild, no Friday, no millennium, no weeks, but we are harassed by them daily. They absolutely have their use as they make it possible for so many things to happen, appointments to get our haircut or car serviced or airplane flights to visit family. I have no problem with clock time or calendar time, except our turning them into facts that determine our freedom. Let us use them for our convenience, not the other way around!
Time has become regimented, preparing us to punch time clocks, to follow schedules, to respond to whistles and bells, everything geared towards productivity and conformity. But wild time sows a bit of anarchy into the mix, tossing the day planner into the river, like Shams throwing Rumi's books into the pond. We need days where we are free to know the moment, to be astonished.
Astonishment! Please don't rob me of it.
Don't always tell me of tomorrow's weather.
Let me be rained upon
by an unexpected storm.
~Tony Crispino
Time has been tethered to speed in our culture. When time is money, there is no time to waste; yet those are the days that we relish. We crave time off. We need time that is free and unchained to productivity, to efficiency, to control. Speed rushes us by these moments as if they were unnecessary and pushes us towards our real purpose, which is to make money. But oh the loss of those moments, the rich textured day with little or nothing to do, when the day stretches out in front of us inviting us to unfold. But this takes time. We may be a little uncertain of this kind of time however, as it simultaneously invites an awareness of our internal world. We may find ourselves facing the emptiness I wrote about and this can become uncomfortable. I would encourage you to face this empty place and to allow the spaciousness that accompanies open time to gradually woo you deeper into the moment, into the world. Even the discomfort can be something holy, something entirely revelatory. See what is awaiting you in the quiet, in the slow times, in the not doing of your life.
When time and speed become interwoven, the result is not good. We become restless, anxious, and fearful of entering into those timeless moments. So we stay busy and always doing something. Idle hands, you may recall, are the devil's workshop. How we fear being still. Brother David Stiendl-Rast shared at a talk he gave that the Chinese word for busy is spelled with two ideograms which mean “heart” and “killing.” Shockingly instructive! We pride ourselves on how busy we are and call those not motivated to move with haste through their lives, lazy and worthless. Yet all of our hyperactivity is seemingly designed to afford us leisure time. The irony is extreme. I recall how uncomfortable I was for the first few days in Africa when we often didn't do anything for hours but sit and track the shade. Was I bored or restless or simply unaccustomed to stillness? I believe it was the latter. I have since practiced not doing and I am pleased to say, I have become much more comfortable with not filling up my time.
There are times when we gather to do ritual over the course of numerous days when we notice changes in the way we move. Something is recovered during this time outside of our daily lives. We slow to soul time and things no longer carry a sense of urgency, only a sense of timing; when to begin, when to finish, what needs our attention, and on and on. People will often comment on how they just arrived after a couple of days of being there, feeling just how long it took to truly adjust to the rhythm of nature, the community, the rituals, to the moment. It takes that type of space to stop the world as we are conditioned to experience it and to feel it as it is being offered to us now.
Time, as I am speaking of it in the old ways, is also connected to our capacity to love. When we move quickly, rashly, hastily through the day or through a lifetime, we do not stop to meet the other that is present before us. I frequently have couples in my office, caught in the gyre of having too little time for their relationship. Somehow everything else takes priority. Intimacy requires slowing down. It takes time to listen to one another, to hear the intricacies behind the words of our partners. It takes time to feel into the sorrows and longings of one another. It certainly takes time to fully make love and enter the tangled nest of Eros. Love is the central experience of being human, yet we grant it so little space and time in our daily lives. The same is true for the ever-expanding arc of love as it is cast out into the world encompassing trees, stones, sand and sky. Every relationship requires maintenance, requires time in order for its fullness to be encountered. Kenneth Rexroth touches this place of time and love in his poem, Lute Music.
The Earth will be going on a long time
Before it finally freezes;
Men will be on it; they will take names,
Give their deeds reasons.
We will be here only
As chemical constituents-
A small franchise indeed.
Right now we have lives,
Corpuscles, Ambitions, Caresses,
Like everybody had once-
Here at the year's end, at the feast
Of birth, let us bring to each other
The gifts brought once west through deserts-
The precious metal of our mingled hair,
The frankincense of enraptured arms and legs,
The myrrh of desperate, invincible kisses-
Let us celebrate the daily
Recurrent nativity of love,
The endless epiphany of our fluent selves,
While the earth rolls away under us
Into unknown snows and summers,
Into untraveled spaces of the stars.
Let us celebrate the daily recurrent nativity of love! What an exquisite invitation to renew the bonds of loving daily, discovering the fresh territory of your lover, the ground, the air. Eros requires a slowing down and entering into that time outside of time. This does not always mean taking an entire day off from activity; what it means is allowing those moments when Eros is present to register, to touch you and to slow you down. Eros is the principle of connection and in our hyperactive modes of connection via email and text messaging; it is the actual touch and feel of our day that allows the “endless epiphany of our fluent selves.”
My daily practice is to wake and bring to my awareness the statement, “I am one day closer to my death. How will I live this day? How will I meet those with whom I come in contact? I don't want to have wasted this day.” This practice draws me into a heightened awareness of this moment and how every moment invites me into full presence.
To the indigenous soul, time is a fluctuating and mercurial presence, not fixed or solid. It is indeed wild, inviting connection, play, imagination, silence, stillness, reverence and a sense of presence. To touch the eternal in the ordinary movements of the day requires that we attend to the meandering stream of time as it flows through our life joining us simultaneously with what was and what will be, knowing they are all available in the now. The challenge is not to fill our time with activity and allow the moments to be what they are, invitations to connection: All in good time.