Time

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain/And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today/And then one day you find ten years have got behind you/No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

-Pink Floyd - ‘Time’

It’s been a while since I wrote anything. Not just here, anywhere. Even the notebooks have been lying like lined fallow fields, my notes app has one deranged poem that came to me in sleep paralysis from the point of view of an ancient spider. So far, so normal. Instead, I’ve been working away at some art, like this one. I’m at the ‘collage icons of Mary Magdalene’ stage of whatever is happening with me and it’s hugely enjoyable to unhook my brain from the snarl of unwritten words and do this with it instead.

The heavy drowse of summer, and the recent heatwave, does not mix well with my liver medication, so I’ve also been spending a lot of time lying down with a cool flannel under my neck pondering the universe. Thinking about sickness and its strange gateway to heaven. Tasting the tiny, still slices of life like secret oranges; last night’s so-bright Sister Moon gliding over London gardens, the clouds above her radiating such a blinding aura of white and lavender that I couldn’t focus on them. The leaves of the cherry tree were moving slightly in the breeze, gentle black shapes against all that silver and indigo. I lay there watching us revolve in the mathematical dance of the spheres for who knows how long. No sound, even on a Saturday night, but the shush of the cooling air and the faintest clink of cutlery from an open window next door, a midnight chorus of stainless steel.

Chronic illness has a way of bending time. Warped by a potent combination of cognitive deterioration and strong painkillers, I have become seriously unmoored from linear happenings. In one way this is very hard, I’ve had to give up some of the work I loved - because, pain aside, you can’t keep track of a group of volunteers when you no longer know what week it is without effort - and struggle to keep on top of day to day life. My diary now goes with me everywhere like a spare rectangular limb, and even that’s patchy because I keep forgetting to put appointments in it. On the other silver-lined hand I have the best present moment awareness of my life, because I don’t know what the hell is going on.

Jesus said:

“Therefore, heed my words. Do not be concerned about your life and what you will have to eat or drink, or about your body and what you will wear. Surely life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing.

Gaze upon the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or store in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of far greater value than they? Can any of you through worrying add a single moment to your span of life?”

-Matthew 6:25-28

Tomorrow - and tomorrow’s emails telling me I’ve forgotten something important - do indeed have troubles of their own, and it’s best not to worry about them right now, as the second coffee works its hazelnut magic on this lovely Sunday morning,

I came across this video earlier this year during all this contemplation on time, and I strongly recommend watching it. More than once. The beautiful Paul Ashton discussing his life with early onset dementia and baring his extraordinary soul. Are we willing to be made nothing? If not, we will never really change. If we are unwilling to dissolve the fantasy of expectation into the mystery, will we ever really love as God loves?

It’s easy to write or say ‘do not worry,’ but bloody hell, it’s hard to practice the detachment the Lord asks in the world polluted with everything we have wrought. That’s why the monastery or the convent or the temple exists, why they plough years into meditation and prayer - because it’s hard. From increasing social and economic division to the boiling spectre of climate change, it doesn’t look too good from our individual pilot’s chair outside the convent walls, but beyond the cares and troubles of life is the deeper, strong and flowing current of the Mystery. The everpresent living water surging beneath the cracked and dry sidwalk of the soul. To submerge yourself in that is to be made the most wonderful nothing. The starting gun of Pink Floyd fame matters a lot less in the eternal, incomprehensible now. That now is filled from sea to edgeless sea with God.

I can add not one second to my span by worry, but I can add sublime richness to the moments I have without it. Wise salt on the meat of me. Medications and memory loss and money troubles are banging on my door. I am looking out of the window, at that silver shilling moon.