Life is like a dog chew–speaking metaphorically. (Session 2, Assignment 1)

 

In reflecting on this week’s TSK quote, about how issues on this level can be a useful indication of what is being blocked out from a higher level, I was drawn to two kinds of exploration.

 Reflection: I seem to always make spatial metaphors when I reflect on time.  (Time is a river on whose edge I stand, and into whose flow I sometimes step).  And extending this metaphor: I feel nourished and supported when I trust this flowing river to deliver what is needed—all in good time.

          Perhaps this is a reflection of how limitation on one level is a symbol of a higher unity on another level.  The space image of a river of time carrying what is needed and having an edge to traverse may be an indication that time and space are inseparable.  (We can never know time except through what arises dynamically in space.  And we can never know space except through the dance of time which space allows.)

 The Whirling Dervish: Red, a nine-month old puppy, member of our household for the past month, has a seemingly insatiable appetite for boxes of Kleenex, rolls of toilet paper, tubes of toothpaste & medicine, basically anything that she can reach, including my glasses, shoes, remotes.  They all get chewed like pistachio nuts whose shells are left littering the floor.  She is like a visitor from another kind of time (rapid, fitful, boundlessly energetic) impinging on my own familiar kind of time (slow, relaxed, methodical, in which intentions are allotted their share of limited energy and awareness).  Space is also exposed in a new way.  Stacking anything worth preserving into tottering piles on top of tables and dressers, trying to mindfully close bathroom doors, I become aware of space in the act of protecting it from the incursions of the Red Dervish (and her oral lineage).

          I’m not sure that I have penetrated the “higher message” that is being “locally blocked out”, but it is a revelation to see how my comfortable kinds of time and space are infiltrated by Red’s different kinds of time and space.  Trying to wear her out by taking walks, I am drawn into the space outside, and protecting various paper products from her, I am made more aware of the space inside the house.  As for the space inside everything and the time that stitches the Persian carpet of life, I’m still standing at the edge of the river sniffing the air for another tasty hand-out.

–Michael Gray