Falling Out the Bottom (#102)

9. APAPB. I am lying here thinking about being in the music room at college and listening to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony for the very first time and transporting myself back to the child on my grandparent’s farm, sitting on a mulberry tree, picking off berries while watching the cows, chewing and chewing and chewing, watching me. I hear crows gathered in trees nearby and watch a caterpillar inching along a branch, looking for a leaf, appreciating the taste of the mulberries, the blue sky, fluffy clouds, and the warm summer sun, and the freedom of the moment. I drop from the tree and pull off a pod from a milkweed plant and explore its contents, blowing the seeds into the air and getting my fingers all sticky. I wipe my hands on my pants, put on my straw hat, and set off along the fence line where I come across a dead groundhog with its bloated body open on the side and hundreds of worms busy feasting on the decaying flesh. I watch, fascinated and repulsed, poke it a few times with a stick to see what happens, backing away as hundreds of flies and other flying insects emerge from the carcass, and then turn away. blow out the putrid odors from my nose and keep going, stopping to watch a butterfly and then a rabbit who is startled by my presence. My childhood self sits down and thinks about art class in the school in the inner city where I had been given a large piece of paper and the freedom to draw what I wanted and had made a mural of the farm. My mind wanders to another project, drawing the gray cityscape outside the windows, factories with water towers with ladders up the sides, church steeples, smoke rising from a myriad of chimneys, modest architectural decoration on the rooftops, and a sky gray from the smoke from all the coal burning furnaces in the houses. I shift on my bed and picture myself in the Catskills with my young children in two canoes, paddling around the edge of a lake, watching little fish dart in and out beneath us in the crystal clear water, enjoying the mountains rising all around us, the green darkened with the shadows of clouds, the tops of the mountains hidden in the same clouds, and the pleasure of sharing the moment with these young eyes. Sitting in the boat, I think of my own young eyes at the mountains and a lake in Western Pennsylvania, watching the fish from another boat in crystal clear water, the waves lapping up against the sides of the boat, the houses and mountains passing by the boat, the closer ones changing shape faster than those in the distance. A mosquito buzzes my ear again and I glance around the room, looking for my torturer, and then out the window where all is darkness. When I was a teenager at camp, I remember walking out of the cabin and looking at the thousands of stars above. At the farm too we say many stars too although not quite as many as in those clear Pocono skies. Sitting in the backseat of the car, coming home from the farm, my first lunar eclipse, a full eclipse, the moon being enveloped as we traveled along the road with farms on either side. The moon turning red about halfway home and the spectacle reversing itself as the moon emerged from behind the shadow. The home in the city, such a contrast to the farm, almost no trees at all on our street except for the occasional tree of heaven with its one stalk sticking up through the winter. Looking out the window watching the man come around to light the gas lamps with his little ladder. Running up and down the hot sidewalks, learning every little interesting spot. The old shoe scraper by marble steps, the water pipes by the steps to a factory where we sat and imagined ourselves sitting in a sheriff’s office in the old west. The tall wood fences made from scrap wood, every board different, some of the boards bulging or loose so we could peak behind them into a whole new world on the other side. Lying in bed hearing the whistle of the steam train on the main line. The black wrought iron fences. All these, the appearances of Being.

8. F. In a discussion on anger, Stim notes how instructive that anger can be. Doug also has mentioned how when he is agitated he learns more and I have found that in the past too. For the past 3 weeks I stayed calm while all was chaos around me and now the chaos is me. There may be more than just time festering here. I have realized that I feel I am losing touch with the group now that I am more busy. Ideas seem to have developed in my absence and I seem to have missed stuff

7. F. I was looking at some old logs and Pema mentioned then that I had a tiger by the tail and jokingly warned me I might be eaten. Hmmm. Bottom dropping out doesn’t seem so bad. I had a childish enthusiasm those first couple of weeks. I was fortunate to find PaB at the beginning of the summer

6. F. Who am I? In what time am I living?

5. F. It is certainly understandable why it is important to focus on the moment. Basically we are alive or we are not. There is alive time and that is all there is for us. The rest is history. Why does the rest have to be illusion? The hardest thing for us is not dealing with our own mortality but those of others. How does time help with that?

[I shouldn't be writing anything at all. I am tired and stressed and not thinking rationally. I would go to sleep except that I can not leave here now]

4. F. pause. Digging into work

3. F. pause. Will I be able to find time to think about time?

2. Gr. Most of the same things for which to be to be grateful

1. TGT. I am alive

***********

I have been pretty open on this blog so far but I am having trouble with this one possibly because, for the first time, I feel a conflict with my basic beliefs. I am sensing this may be unresolvable. If the answer to my query, about the seeming contradiction of who I am, is based on the question of time, and time is an illusion, then there is no person there at birth and at death. It can’t be both ways. One interesting sign, when I woke up this morning I felt at peace, tired from the exhaustion of facing this, but calm until I began to focus on the problem again. Judging from the despair and anger, “self” is very threatened by this.

One other point of note is that the contradictions I feel are based on my own observations; I have been thinking that the “time is illusion” issue requires a leap of faith equivalent to believing there is a heaven or we are reincarnated. Even on a cosmic level, stars are born and die, galaxies are moving away from one another. Mankind has been on this earth a short time and is working hard toward its own extinction. Time moves slowly on this scale but it seems to be moving. I can think in terms of this slow moving cosmic time and that my time is not significant in comparison. Even thinking in terms of my own DNA lines, I am only one over hundreds of generations. We come, we live, we go. Where is the illusion in that other than that we are important to the larger scheme of things?

This morning Pema suggested that it may require looking at the issue with a different hypothesis, that there is a fourth time. I can’t begin to fathom what that means or how that works, unless it is cosmic time. But I am willing to entertain the notion. In the meantime, I also am willing to consider the hypothesis that the conflict I am feeling is not unresolvable. But I am feeling uneasy about this.