Times

.
My experience of time has little to do with clocks nowadays,
though I understand the human being's need to have a sense
of chronos, of a linear and countable time. I remain more
involved with kairos, the other kind of time the Greeks created
a word for. Kairos, as I experience it, is all time, collected in the
great palm of now. It's what passed through you that morning
when two cars cut you off on the freeway and, as if in slow motion,
collided and exploded into fire, and one minute later you had taken
the next off-ramp and pulled into a parking lot, turned off the car
engine, and sat alone there with your heartbeat.

Kairos is the way we remember tomorrow. It is as though all of
our experiences hold hands and move in us like children whose
purpose is to keep us closer to amusement than despair. I'm no
enemy to chronos, but counting time can be a form of subtle
torture intended to keep us from all-time-now experiences and
deeper states of being. I am amused to know that, in one second,
a hummingbird's wings beat 70 times, that the copulation of gray
squirrels lasts an average of 2.4 seconds, that it takes bees just
15 seconds to communicate by dancing, that a flying fish's average
flight lasts 30 seconds, that a snowflake takes 10 minutes to form,
and that the male indigo bunting sings at least 8,640 songs per day.

It's been 53 years today my mother tells me, 53 years of escaping
the capture of clocks en route to the land of kairos, and I'm happy
to tell you that, on this my birthday, I'm still on the loose. I'm not
even certain that I'm wanted anymore in the towns of the dreaded
tick-tick-tock. It's dark in the meadows of the soul. Fabulously dark.

I remain under the spell of candles.