I feel fully present in this moment, feeling deeply intimate with what is, sitting on the porch surrounded by color; the cave of maples caving in, slowly crumbling, dropping lemon-yellow leaves, against emerald patches, with dots and waves of crimson, while cornstalks are left to shine golden in the distance. I feel full and appreciative, fortunate to inhabit the moment. I wonder about expanding this experience. I know from before it can’t be grasped, but it seems it can be allowed for awhile.
But then, thoughts begin to fill in. I seem to want to pursue time. How far can I expand this moment? Thoughts begin to refer, metrics start processing. I can stretch time forward as if I were a disembodied point, a rapid time-lapse view from dropping leaves, flickering day and nighttimes passing, changing seasons… winter skies, snow covered cornfield, changing to new turned earth, new growth emerging. Moving faster; seasons flickering by, trees disappearing, structures rising, centuries passing like nanoseconds, structures deteriorating, disappearing, conflagration, Earth is gone, space expansive, planets moving, Milky Way galaxy spinning colliding into another spinning galaxy…then space and not-knowing.
I realized I was expanding a scenario, one that in my mind was fleetingly reasonable, a stream of meaningful “if this, then that” associations. At each point of my time-lapse view, what newly appeared seemed to confirm what was earlier reasonable to assume. The rules of logic and science, or my knowledge of them, seemed to justify and underpin my imaginative venture. My ‘expanding’ was done along a line, a kind of linear unfolding, and was inherently limited by the scope and direction of my scenario.
It seems my ‘expanding’ proceeded to the limits of that field of inquiry. Like a liquid medium, a pool rippling out from a center that seeks to control or conduct what is focused upon, I did have a sense of where I would arrive as I embarked on my expanding scenario. I did have a sense of the whole before I began, as I recall. I knew I would reach a point of not-knowing, of open space.
DavidÂ
