And then one day you find
Ten years have gone behind you…
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you’re older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death
~ Pink Floyd’s ‘Time’ by Richard Wright and David Gilmore
Time has been on my mind lately. Some days seem to fly by, while some minutes seem to last forever. But in every case, we are only gifted a limited time on this beautiful planet.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
~ Mary Oliver
A book I’m reading by physicist Carlo Rovelli called “The Order of Time” reminds us that what we think of as the marking of time is a creation of our culture. He notes that not that long ago, we didn’t bother to monitor and manage time with clocks and time zones. Those inventions only came about when we moved another step away from the natural rhythms of dark and light, the travel of the moon, stars, and sun across the sky. They were created in another of our misguided efforts to tame nature. Only when machines began to move us rapidly across the land did we need to agree on it being the same time here as it was there.
So, if time is a mental construct, what would it look like to fall back into the arms of the beloved earth and spend moments outside that construct?
Why do I find this compelling right now? Because we are at the mercy of the passing of the past into the future. There can be no such thing as now because it is already gone. We may remember the past (more and more vaguely possibly), and we envision a future that is, in fact, only a dream.
It begins to sink in that we are foolish to “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way” (Pink Floyd again). Since we only have now and now is already gone, what is our motivation and passion that compels us to get up each day, to sing, to dance, to pray, and to work?
This is our practice this week. Invoke the assistance of the Divine and the Ancestors. Aspire with all your heart to know “the purpose that [divine] wisdom chooses.” (paraphrased from the prayer Saum gifted to us by Hazrat Inayat Khan). Vigilantly open to the best possible use of every wild and precious moment of the limited time we are gifted.
And don’t forget to be thankful when you hear the answer to your prayer. This is the blessed and beautiful experience of “God” that Hazrat Inayat Khan speaks to when he says, “The time comes when the belief in God is replaced by the experience of God.”
And as a final gift to all of you, my beloveds, here is the rest of St Mary Oliver’s wild and precious poem, “The Summer Day.”
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
