Shorter than me

Tag: love

  • Too soon to tell

    Will the new year come with love and warmth and joy?  Will the bells sound of pleasure?  Will it bring with it, good cheer and peacefulness?  Maybe it’s too soon to tell.

    Better to try for attention and brighter mornings.  Tether the distraction to the wall.  Sing more, learn the jitterbug, walk slower through the day.  Purposely slow it down.

    Honestly, though, it’s just too soon to tell.

    The secret hush of the eve falls.  And like Janus, we see both years for the shortest of times.  While noting the past and the future we, ofcourse, miss right now.

    What did we learn?  What did we find out more about?  How were we kinder and more loving?  What did we give our attention to, and what filled us with excitement and delight? 

    Maybe just do more of that?

    When there’s a fork in the road, and we have to choose which path to take, how do we discern better?  Should we take the easy road, with the daisies and the smiling cow?  Or should we, instead, choose the harsher way, where the dragons spill out loss, sorrow and evil from their noses, and rancid pain from inside of their mouths?  There’s a better story in the poorer choice, and a stronger lesson to be learned.

    What to do if this year, is surprisingly sadder even than last year?  Yes, pain.  They said, “pain, my dear is a part of it” and it seems to be quite central.  I’m afraid.

    So it comes: another year of life.  Of this mystery and magic and gravity.  All that we are, were and will be, sits for a moment in quiet stillness.  Mistakes and sins, accolades and prideful times, sleep and starlight.

    Back straight, eyes forward.  Attention.  Love and kindness.

    Good luck everyone, good luck!

  • Peaceful warrior

    Peaceful warrior

    Recently, a stranger started to speak to Grace in the arrival’s hall of terminal two, in Dublin airport.  She was waiting for a cousin to arrive in from Edinburgh, and a man began a conversation about time.

    How funny it was, he said, that when people are waiting for a plane to land, time slowed into infinity.  Yet, no doubt the time spent with the people on the plane, would speed up exponentially.  The man cited an article he’d read lately, about how it was possible to control the perception of time.  All you had to do, he claimed, to slow down the perception of time, was to find something novel and fulfilling in each and every day.

    “Like this conversation?” asked Grace, and the man laughed loudly and said, “yes, exactly so”.

    They talked about technology and how detailed the airport information was compared with years earlier.  Nowadays, the large overhead boards told those waiting when the plane was approaching the airport, the moment of landing, when it was taxing to the gate, and when exactly the passengers had officially landed.  The man and Grace didn’t know, however, what to do with this extra information, or the moments of time gained.

    Were they to split the second?

    Grace was meeting a cousin she hadn’t seen since childhood and was both excited and nervous about the weekend.  When she was a child, Grace spent time visiting her cousins on a farm near Ross-on-Wye.  Her three older cousins seemed to Grace to have an idyllic existence with their dogs, chickens, sheep, and ponies.  The cousins always smelled of earth and came in enormous, warm, cosy clothes that were so well lived in.  Grace was meeting the eldest of the three sisters, at the airport.

    One time they all went to Tintern Abbey to see the ruins and they took a picnic, a flask of hot tea and a blanket to sit on.  The cousins, used to wide open spaces and running, grew tired and restless and started a game of hide and seek.

    Grace ran as fast as she could and hid between the gravestones, far away from everyone.  She huddled down beside the grave of a man who had died in 1732.

    He died when he was 34 and was missed by a loving wife and eight children.  Grace wondered if this man liked music if he played the piano or sang?  This fellow, this dead fellow, did he play hide and seek with the children, or was he too serious for games?

    Did he laugh and look at rainbows with such awe it made it want to cry?  Did he dance every chance he got and marvel at the extraordinary brightness of colour?  Did he lose sleep with worry about his eight children, his wife, the harvest, and the rain?  And did he, at times, realise fully that the best way through his short life, was to be a peaceful warrior; to defend himself fully, while not ever causing harm to any other creatures?  Did he wonder about the particles of atoms into the otherness of eternity.

    Did his children make him laugh; and did he ever save some time?