The hands of time

It took me fifty-nine years to get here. Awakened to the fact that I am a sleepwalker.

These last weeks I have moved to the side of me that consists of image, it seems to take me away from the language realms. Meaning I have trouble finishing my weekly essays. There is a good stack of drafts that do not wish to be published as of yet.

But I have written a long, long time without any readers and now there are almost two hundred of you on this slow growing list. While I mostly thrive on working toward this weekly deadline I also see it takes a lot of energy. And it kept me from what I love best. Allowing stories to come through and catching them on paper. So, fewer essays, sometimes older work that I feel is still relevant, definitely more fiction coming up and I will try and share the visual journey that I have started.

This week you’ll have to make do with a birthday meditation and the sketch that comes along with it. I hope you enjoy.

I am a multitude.

It took me fifty-nine years to get here. Awakened to the fact that I am a sleepwalker. I drift along. And despite all the effort, all the hard work, all the adding, the listening, the figuring out, the thinking, the learning, I do not know or understand.

The day, a grain of sand in the hourglass of life. Forced to pass quickly in relentless succession.

The gravity of time empties the clear reservoir, and each day falls into the growing pile of time wasted. The bottom glass almost full. Words gathered. Plans executed. Lives spent.

I cried writing this. I felt the approach. The arrival. She is no stranger. She keeps coming back unannounced. Time after time.

If I've ever claimed being a good listener, I must confess to having lied. I sang too loud, fingers plugging my ears, eyes tightly shut. Frightened most of my days and nights. Unwilling to hear, or see, or feel.

As words pass me by, I can hop on and catch a ride. Be taken for a spin. And I have been. For too long, I believed what I was told about time. Ruled by a clock imposed.

But you cannot set a clock by sunrise. Because the rising shifts from day to day. Every morning the event passes you by. The clock tower is the idol of a church lost in time. The mechanical clock is the whip of a factory grinding human flesh into products. Life hammered by a dead beat. The intrusive tick-tock entering our dreams through doors unguarded. This watch is ending.

Have you ever tried to run out of time? Real time chuckles at the attempt. And she wonders how you do not notice being in time all of your days and nights.

All of your hits and misses,

all of your hurrying and lazying,

all of your ageing and weathering,

all of your kissing and cursing,

all of your birthing and dying

is in time.

The hands of time.

Nothing is off beat when you are held. Time and place are entwined you see.

Music is local.

Heartbeats are personal.

But the rhythm of your breath is no longer yours in a world full of prison clocks,

of trains missed,

of flight above the clouds,

of haste

and the waiting rooms of departure.

Clocks do not tell the time. Real time is local. The actual hands of time are your hands. The keepers of real time are led by ears and other senses. The body listens. You can pick up the beat and hit the sweet spot with the hands of time. The pocket between lead and follow. Between call and response. Between left and right, you make the pattern happen. In real time.

I am a multitude.

All at the same time.

Not a succession of events. Time is the event. Thing and place are time. Travel is time. In any direction. The faster you go, the slower you are.

If you move along, the sun just keeps on rising.