Friday, May 05, 2017

Time is a Moving Thing


Time has been a very relative thing for me these days. Spring is always a rush. Flowers bud, bloom and petals fall in just hours as the sun chases night across the sky.  Within a month we have days of spring, summer and fall crammed together like a mixed race family, each with their own pleasures and pitfalls.


I watch a bluebird househunt in the morning, build a nest in the afternoon and lay her eggs while I am sleeping that evening.



The purple iris blossoms race each other down the strong stems while spewing out grape scent across the yard and finally giving way in the strong rains bowing down to the lawn.  My roses cover the arbor and then in what seems just a day or two drop all of their lovely pink petals like best wishes at the wedding march.



My days have been full of tasks and errands and trips and schedules and spring continues on her way not waiting for me or anyone.  My obligations are only on my time.  Her time is hidden somewhere in a space continuum over which I have no control and little awareness.  Did you know that a long time ago towns had their own schedules and set their clocks without coordination of any nearby village?  Their time/space continuum did not depend on anything other than their view of how fast the sun was moving.

Time is relative.  Someone, somewhere, has a spring that lasts at least a month.  They sip tea and watch the morning sun kiss the buds of roses and then watch as Dianthus burst forth with their cinnamon scents and pink lace-edged blossoms.  They watch the bird building the softest of homes with bits of grass and tufts of seed pods along several days.



Mother Earth has her own time clock.  It goes so much slower than ours that we miss the melting of icebergs, the increased flooding of coastal planes which climbs each year, the death of tiny microscopic beings that hold hands with larger microscopic beings until entire coral reefs centuries old are gone...and so on, and so on.

The data gatherers notice these things because their clock moves much slower than mine.  They can gaze over decades past as they thumb through their well-worn penciled notebooks of graphs and numbers and they count the changes in meaningful ways.  Soon this earth time will catch up with us all.



16 comments:

  1. A thought-provoking post. As I get older, time seems to be moving far too quickly.

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  2. Indeed it will. The rapidity of time and change is a scary prospect.

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  3. To me it seems like someone is turning a wheel... slowly when we are young, then gradually faster and faster until one day blends into the next as we age.

    And I really like that picture you posted at the end. Did you paint that?

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    1. I used a filter from Topaz software.

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  4. Our lack of remembering that we don't inherit the planet from our forebears but instead borrow it from our posterity will catch up to us sooner or later, and i'm afraid it will be sooner.

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  5. Lovely written post

    Reading blogs provides me with lovely perspective of time as the flowers bloom one zone while the buds are barely showing color in another. Blogs, in the latitude of my brain, are seasons of the same blog forest, field and yard. If I read a blog farther towards the North Pole, then there'd be snow on the ground with apple blossoms scenting the air.

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  6. What a nicely connected and insightful piece. Very timely. Ahem.

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  7. Every thing is moving so fast..
    Love your last image.

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  8. This is a well written and terrific post.

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  9. Well done! I truly enjoyed reading this and putting myself into the words. I too have been astounded at how quickly the spring is moving into summer. Beautifully written and a keeper for sure. Have a great weekend, it'll be over before we know it. :-)

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  10. very nice. time is all relative. and it slows down to a snail's pace in late summer when all we want is a cool breeze.

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  11. Time is indeed mysterious for how it sometimes crawls and other times races by. I am enjoying our weather. Beltane is supposed to be the beginning of summer and it does seem that way here with all the birds and the first baby birds appearing at the feeders. Summer is my favorite season.

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  12. Lovely essay, time is indeed strange, linear or otherwise, as in other times it drifted over our country until someone took it in hand and made it similar for every village and town. Must have been the coming of the railways when you had to work to a timetable...

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  13. I am so enjoying all your flowers. You preserve them for us, and they are like a smile from Spring....or summer, or fall if time circles that way. Yes, the railways reset our time to some degree of uniformity. Personally, I'd like the world to stay on Summer like it did when we were kids.

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  14. Time is perplexing. I enjoy your exploration of it, but come no closer to my own understanding. A quote that I like: "Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth." (Rabindranath Tagore)

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  15. Time does seem to be going faster and faster. Every Friday I wonder where the rest of the week went. When we lived in Chicago it seemed spring and fall were only two weeks long. Winter seemed an eternity.

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Take your time...take a deep breath...then hit me with your best shot.