Photo courtesy National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons
Some of my earliest memories, I realize now, are actually of time. The invisible wind making a wave that approached in the prairie grass; dappled light under the tree that changed with the incidence of the sun. The fatigue of long summer days—heat, humidity, playing with friends, water breaks. Time for this and for that; time to spend time with the dog and our many cats. To watch a box turtle slowly chew mulberries on the path, then to be surprised when it had disappeared, like magic, because my attention wandered for longer than I measured. To savor the green dream of love, with its promised riches of experience, in the onset of mosquitoes and lightning bugs at dusk.
Everything is time. More accurately, everything is mystery propagated in energy and manifested in playful forms of temporal matter. Our food: raised, grown, harvested, slaughtered, milled, processed, packed, shipped, and prepared in time. Our reputations, our fashions, our technologies, not as of the moment as they might seem. The gasoline my mother dripped on piles of leaves at the curb in the fall, the smell and the crump of flame, made possible by thousands of millennia of heat and pressure. The burning was deceptively quick but continues to wend into the future. Mountains wore down, became rounded and gentle, in the time of that transaction. My Uncle Paul, who worked for a Ford dealer and laughed a lot, was alive just yesterday—he died half a century ago.
I think now and then of people criticizing Lincoln for being overindulgent with his sons.
Time is the greatest benefit, after a personal platform: shelter, sustenance, education, caring. The happy home embodies the time of a life. Cool from the vents—it is hot out now, hotter than yesterday, which was hotter than the day before—a cat lies on the back of the couch in the sun, the neighbor dog sniffs the door. A wall of books and time to crawl down their sentences toward their conclusions. Children are in the house, for now.
The nearby river, full of mountains, flows; the plants, full of water, grow; crows call they will no longer be judged by that hawk. They are happy when they are together or hear each other’s voices. They sit like musical notes on a staff. They flap like fish sharing the sea. Time has little to do with career or ease of purchase, and everything to do with life and democracy.
