flow

the middle of the week!
time flies by.
i read recently that time flows differently for children than it does for adults because children experience greater degrees of novelty in their lives than older people. the thinking i guess is that learning about new experiences and dealing with them causes time to "slow down". if you think about how there are so many elements of our adult days that are so the same and how as children there are more elements that require problem solving and learning about, then i suppose there could be some truth in that. maybe that's why so many musicians and artists and dancers live so long.
here's some draft writing by musician robert fripp:
" Each world has its own kind of time. The material world knows time as linear, as measured and measurable. Our bodies are born, move through a period of years, and then die. We become familiar with the experience of sequential time. Were we to suddenly experience eternity in terms of our everyday linear experiencing, for example, we may experience this as an unbearable acceleration of information. The acceleration of the associational mind, throwing up an encyclopaedia of spreading information flows in response to every particular thought, might drive us mad if we were unable to unplug."
rocks appeal to me and to my children equally. in part because they are (like people) each so individual and unique and then also because each carries its own beauty - sometimes in its whole form and sometimes in part. the feature that we overlook - and maybe that's not entirely fair - but the feature that is often passed over in our experiencing of the beauty of rocks is their age. millions, hundreds of millions, billions of years old and we are able to hold them in our hands and wonder at their formation and then their eventual dissolution into smaller rocks, sand, dust. there's something of the eternal in rocks that is reminding of our own eternal selves.
todays' picture was taken in the gatineau hills northeast of ottawa at a friend's cottage. the rock is at the point where a small stream about five metres across empties into a little lake. my friend has placed rocks at an angle across the mouth of the stream to divert the flow of water. he has made several corrections to the design that have actually worked in clearing away the weeds and silt from the underwater area by the little beach. it's not novel or amazing but i am mesmerized by it each time i visit.

i know that we can measure natural processes and put an age on objects as old as the world we live on but somehow watching nature, i lose all sense of time and when that happens i also feel my physical presence become unimportant even unnecessary. i become more a part of the wholeness of it all and then, i simply am.