Looking for the presence of time between the ‘moments’ I experience, I can glimpse the limitations of what I call ‘moments’. Observable thoughts and perceptions catch my attention precisely because there is a stake in them for ‘me’.
–I want another cup of coffee
–I feel frightened for my son
–my dog is licking her paw
Relationships, wants, fears, and appetites share the quality of being marked by the concerns of the self and its sense of being embedded in linear time, but these perceived ‘moments’ also express the dynamic of a time that feels broader and deeper than my individual engagements with it.
Moments seem like the barnacles on the back of a breaching whale. Somehow I ordinarily only notice the barnacles on her back. Perhaps this is because they provide the separation from one another that allows me to construct out of their diversity a matrix of moments which feels real and which provides a place for me to stand (because ‘I’ am both engineer and foreman of this constructed ‘reality’).
However the whale is whole, living, and a visitor from a deeper realm than any I could possibly construct out of the ‘paint by numbers’ lines I draw between moments.
Can this give a clue to how I might move in time, in a way in which all I experience might be recognized as given freely, not requiring that ‘I’ mine and fabricate a ‘reality’ in order to sit at its center?
–Michael
