ABOUT TIME 2

My necessary assumption for interior and productive living is that there is a God. Not a dogmatic compilation, nor a wood or metal impressionistic form, but a mysterious being I cannot specifically at this time describe. He is reflected in my potential, but knowing myself I know nothing in me is God. Mystery puts him beyond my control, my shabby attempts to manipulate. All I know of him is what he has chosen to tell me. His self-definition does not bequeath me pellucid clairvoyance or special endurance.  Merely a place in his created time.

I am reticent to place money on the first date life materialized. Others may and declare the days of the earth boldly as if their surety matters. A video production at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry seriously pictured life wriggling from a lapping body of water, some ancient primordial ooze. I laughed out loud at the faith required to believe such mud-hued fancy.

I knew a man who rashly told God the date and time creation would burn. He presaged the finality of frog calls at twilight, of murders of crows silently concealing mischief under their wings in the trees jutting from the darkening gulch, of moles spilling up soil from beneath the iris and campanula as my shovel and water hose rest for the day.

When we are tempted to over-define ourselves, time serves as a reminder that life roots about in the landscape and survives or not regardless of our brief tenure. Our evanescence rises and sets with the sun. It’s about time.

 

ABOUT TIME

Reprinted from June 2012 because I need the reminder.

There is something we sense in our bones, we feel with the pulse of our blood from the start. We speak it impatiently at first, until age and experience bring us awareness we can never sufficiently say it so we will come to it prepared and attentive.

It is the surety of personal aging, of slipping from days to years as we appreciate goals accomplished in their time and admit we would do it differently if we had been who we have become.

It is that no one is singular, exempt from the course that follows our ancestors, and the time we have left waits to be gracefully used as we work slower and less, and rest more than work.

We never think we are old, or done with growing. But such possibilities slip in on a contrary breeze, the dim suspicion that our fundamental accumulations clutter and encumber the accommodations we now need for breathing. More and more we gratefully experience our busyness unwind to leisure, and we are content to savor the dimensions of our remaining space.

I am more willing to indulge interior living with less urgency to produce. Like my few essential household supports, I am becoming more form than function. It’s about time.