Lately, I feel time hidden within the evident. The seed of spring has been emerging from the roan and russet contours of the winter soil. Each day has been like waking up to time-lapse photography; changes in the field out back have been dramatic. Cherry blossoms and lemon-yellow forsythia appear in the midst of diverse greenish shades surrounding. What’s particularly interesting about this vision is that a glow seems to come not from a diffuse grey sky, but from the budding growth and tender colors of the nascent earth, as though there is a light inversion, a kind of gloaming from within. Spring is radiating out, time is unfolding, and I am none other than this.
Floating along the visual plain to a specific point in the distance, I notice what I’m doing, and in that instant of reflection, the ‘floating’ moment became old, as a new moment emerged at this shifting. A green sloping hill slightly rolls into a field of abandoned cornstalks. Time rolls on like the undulating earth while focus, like a butterfly, is lilting and light. I notice what I just did; aware of myself and my ‘doing’, and the act of looking back makes a periphery for an objective past, and a hollow for the emergence of a new moment.
During this little exercise I have no thoughts of a future, no images projected ahead, but the unrestricted and unshaped openness at the edge of the future is intimate. The ‘between’ of now, and the immediate past – ‘the transition‘ from one to the other is open. I am mildly amused to observe an involuntary tendency in me to gather, close out, and move on.
David
Jack,
Thanks for pointing to the TSK discussion on ‘coming-out’, in reference to my statement that I observed an “involuntary tendency in me to gather, close out, and move on.” I found this helpful in linking my experience to the text.
“In one sense, this pattern constitutes a ‘freezing’ of what ‘was’…open and fluid.” p.32,
And that it is: “…the ‘motion’ of ‘time’ which gives rise to the ‘coming out’ tendency of the self, to ‘pointings’…” and “that the ‘self’ is fundamentally a ‘drawing apart’ tendency.” p.264
I know some time I read all that before, but I forgot it, it was not consciously guiding my practice, however, reading it again was like a light going on, not just figuratively, but a light of clarity helping me to see that what I was doing was setting up the bystander-self in the act of separating, in the act of “bystanding”.
Much appreciation,
David
Your last sentence reminds me of the discussion of the ‘coming-out’ tendency, discussed in the first TSK book. You might like to look there.