How Time Recreates – Class 3, Week 4

I am forever telling myself something.  It's easy to notice when I must articulate to a loved one why I said or did something.  Explaining myself to another is often how I objectify a feeling, so that I have an issue to deal with, rather than to just be swept along by the emotion or presumptions of the moment.  I particularize what might be a wash of different, even contradictory feelings.  On the other hand, noticing how I justify to myself I noticed something else.  I tried to catch myself in the act, but I seemed to catch it just afterwards, or even later, but not in the act.  This makes sense, in that to catch it, I objectify the doing of it, and to objectify the doing of it -- to set it apart from being lost in the flow of the narration itself -- I must stop and look back on the memory of it.  And I see, "Ah, I just did it again!"

For instance, if in childhood I was often concerned for my safety because of a parent's unpredictable rage, I might tend to view the world as basically unsafe, and spend at least some of my time being wary about anticipated situations.  My concerns for the future conduct the 'happeneded' by my preoccupation for safety.  Or perhaps if in childhood I didn't receive the affection and attention I needed, if I was often left up to my own devices, then my 'happeneded' world building would focus on trying to fill an emptiness that feels impossible to fulfill, and so I might continually look to the future as a source of happiness, making plans for new experiences, the next new place to go, a new adrenaline rush.  Always looking ahead, I miss the fullness available in the present, at the open edge of the future.

It isn't that planning into an idea of the future is wrong, it's realizing that conducting the past into the present and future without being aware of what we are doing, by relying on identity and position, allows only certain kinds of preconceived knowledge to operate.

The readings tell us:  "To be and to be alive I must connect with the full dynamic of time.  Coming to the future from the past, letting go of the past to open to the future: In the vital 'hereness' of the actual I implicate both past and future, which are 'here' with me."  DTS p.86

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.

I float 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 future's edge is intimate.  The 'between' of now, and the immediate past -- 'the transition' from one to the other is open.