In honor of his birthday, I am - (in paraphrase of his words) - going to jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down. Here goes ...
This evening Time has draped itself, like raw pizza dough, over the mesquite branch in front of the chicken coop. On the very branch where the neighborhood hawk sits, licking it's beaky lips with talon tongue, Time, like a Dali clock, has surrendered itself to gravity, and has gone limp.
This is, truly, way past due.
I am happy - joyous even - to see the limp Time-piece slide slowly off the rough bark. It drops through the mesh of chicken wire, into the coop, landing in one of the dust-bath holes the hens use for bathing. That is where my Time needs to be. If you've never watched a bird Relish it's bathing, you haven't lived. They become one with the earth. Their rigid beaks soften, and begin to turn upward into a smile. They change, literally, the energy around themselves. They remind anything living to "witness and celebrate" (Ray's words).
What I am trying to describe here is Freedom from Time. That the rigid, corseted, shapeshifting, Time that has so dominated me for year upon year is now freeing itself, to become, instead, an ally. It is dropping its Seriousness; it's sense of Importance dissolving; it's choked breath, finally, exhaling.
Letting go of it's old form, it is seems freer to express it's brighter side. When I know more about what that means, I'll write again.
Piggy backing on Time and Clocks, and to CELEBRATE AND WITNESS this remarkable man, a paragraph from Ray Bradbury, in Dandelion Wine:
"The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town in a big state on a large continent on a planet earth hurtling down the pit of space toward nowhere or somewhere and Tom feeling every mile of the long drop. He sat by the front-door screen looking out at that rushing blackness that looked very innocent, as if it was holding still. Only when you closed your eyes and lay down could you feel the world spinning under your bed and hollowing your ears with a black sea that came in and broke on cliffs that weren't there."
Thanks Ray Bradbury! -- for inspiring me to write again, after many, many years.
