Time trio with a soundtrack

Poster by Fred Babb

Ram Dass, BE HERE NOW

Here is the site with the original footage from which the Booker T. video by kiddysoulgirl99 was borrowed, featuring Cab Calloway, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lena Horne and the Nicholas Brothers.  Which tells me in this exploration of time we are also acknowledging timelessness.

Original art by Pretty Scruffy

I rest my case.

Time, patience and serendipity

For some, the juggling act appears so easy while the rest of us stand by,  agog.       M. Kelly stamps for Rubbermoon, Stampington & Co.

Serendipity has been a busy girl.  She appeared yesterday as a blog link titled, "Kim Roasted Vegetables with Yellow Curry Sauce" when I had just thought and mentioned to my son how I would like the recipe for a good vegetable curry.  She revealed another post that told me I am not alone in filling my pockets or piggy bank with tales of finding joy in what we may take for granted.  To read "Applaud the Sunset," posted April 2, visit Molly.  Please browse the sidebar links to discover her unique cards and see if they are carried by a shop near you.  If there are sufficient hours in your day, her blog links also hold aspects of wonder.

For any who find journaling with their own words to be a challenge,  Kelly Kilmer has recent posts about the benefit of using quotes from other sources as a supplement or prompt to reveal your own rare and authentic voice.  She is also offering an on-line journaling workshop, giving us stay-at-home types the opportunity to learn what she teaches around the country.

Regarding the juggling wunderkind shown above, I assumed at some point I would know what I wish to be when I grow up.  And I do know.  However, the list has not grown shorter.  My thoughts radiate like the unicycle's spokes, pointing in five or 15 different directions.  What I can say in my favor is they are all at least slightly related and can be, if I stop dithering, accomplished from right here with basic skills I already possess.  It is just that some of those skills need to be sharpened, refined, expanded, practiced.  That's the telling word, practiced. 

My mental schedule resembles that of the over-scheduled child of over-achieving parents.  Organize, straighten, discard, draw, play with paint, stamp, write fiction, read poetry, color, write non-fiction, correspond, converse, explore, ponder, imagine, sleep.  And drink enough water.  I am not confused; I have what I need (with practice) to do and be what I want.  I just seem to go about it so slowly.  Which drags out into the light the other telling word: patience.  Of all that is asked of me in a day, patience tops the list.  Over many years I've come to trust the process of unfolding that is life and know, absolutely know, that answers I don't have today will either (a) arrive or (b) won't and if they don't it will not matter. 

Taking a prompt from Tolstoy, I remind myself, "The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."  May I have enough of both.

Not quite a rant, but maybe a ramble

The kitchen clock stopped working at least 2 years ago. Both of my old, but not vintage, wristwatches need batteries. Time and I have reached a different plateau in our relationship.

We do have a few clocks, our cell phones and, if I pay attention, the angle of sunlight to help me know when a call needs to be made or dinner started or if I can get those last dishes washed before FRINGE comes on. But time is not the companion I once thought. For many years I truly saw my life as endless, impossible-to-win rounds of BEAT THE CLOCK. So many tasks and deadlines in any given day, no lazing, no lolling. Family members who balked at restaurant Thanksgiving dinners (before the supermarkets started selling whole meals, pre-cooked), Christmas eve, Christmas morning, Christmas day cooking and entertaining. Self-assigned hour thieves like writing class or public access tv training, 12-step programs, volunteer newsletter editing, rubber stamp art and early-morning walking. I had to be stopped and I was. (Reminder: thank body for wisdom which far exceeded that of brain.)

For me, time is a thing that evaporates...you know it was there yet when it has gone, no trace, not even a water line, remains. My perspective is greatly skewed - whether that is good or not, I can't say - and what I think has been a few weeks is actually six or seven months. And then I started listening to talks by people who understand things like energy and physics, who say things such as, "Everything is now." And for a flickering I have a glimpse of what they may be telling us. Concepts appear to me either as visuals or metaphors, or a combination, and I saw time as a bowl of water, out of which I believed I'd been asked to construct something solid and dimensional, as I might have done with a bowl of clay. But it resisted all my efforts to shape it into something that could be called tangible. It was still there, it just wouldn't behave.

My studio bulletin board once held a quote clipped from somewhere that said, "Life should feel like floating." It is more than that, it IS floating, allowing us and all our hours to be here AND there simultaneously. We are at once walking histories of all we've done or seen or heard and also repositories of ages, eons, wisdom and dreams from every direction and distance. This is information that I process slowly, incrementally, noticing without much surprise that there might be a reason why I've always been drawn to stories of time travel. I don't think (speaking of time) that it is too late to learn what physics can teach or perhaps it is a variation on that discipline which holds the answers. My advice? Avoid all who would have you believe that life is not a mind-expanding experience, that all walls are solid and time is just numbers on a clock.

I grew up among people who believed passionately that THIS was not the whole of anything. One of the few teachings I retain from a junior college geology class comes from Edward Teller. We listened to a tape of one of his lectures in which he described everything we could possibly imagine or guess at in the universe - picture great minds really stretching - as being (I quote as accurately as possible) "...a goldfish in a fishbowl on the back of a great white elephant." Will we grasp the lessons that don't match anything we thought we knew? Time will tell.