there was a time

There is no way out of the song of gratitude and complaint
As long as the wisp of breath exists, this harmony remains the same.

---from Mir Dard.


What is pain itself, that is peace of the soul?

---Shah Latif.


Earth poetizes, field to field
with trees interlinear, and lets
us weave our own paths around
the plowed land, into the world

Blossoms rejoice in the wind
Grass stretches out to bed them so softly
Heaven goes blue and greets mildly
soft chains the sun has woven.

People go about, no one is lost-
Earth, heaven, light and forest-
Play in the play of the Almighty.
---Hannah Arendt

There was a time when we didn't question, when the voice didn't quaver and the hand didn't hesitate to accept what was given. There was a time when the frail winter light held things together, when we measured the earth by our stride. Cricket in Victoria Park, deep into the day, the old tree serving as the wickets, the hedge as the boundary. Long summer evenings, bats criss-crossing the sky as the last traces of light left the purple clouds..the moment, from purple to grey, like a face that suddenly becomes sad for no reason...

quaver: a note of time value.

There was a time when what seemed near was very distant, when words lost their meaning and "up" meant "down", "love" meant "hate". But even here, a wisp of life survived, like a thin trace of silver in a darkening mirror, or the flash of desire in your glistening eyes-dazzling reminders, remainders, of another time, another place.


I love television in other cities, the assurance of looking up from my chair in some strange room to see a familiar newscaster talking in his familiar accent...In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still, that the same men and women...things were knowable, safe and sound. Everybody with what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.

We take all the solace we can.

Only suddenly, then, you are out of it-that film, that skin of life-as when you were a kid. And you think: this must have been the way it was once in my life, though you didn't know it then, and don't even really remember it..a feeling of being released, let loose, of being light..this time you want to make it last, this glistening one moment, this cool air, this new living, so that you can preserve a feeling of it, inasmuch as when it comes again it might just be too late. You may just be too old. And in truth, of course, this may be the last time you ever feel this way again.

---Richard Ford


At a certain age the clothes fit. There's an equilibrium between biological and social worlds. It is as if one has grown to one's limits, being has filled us out and there is a certain peace about this, like two overlapping circles finally becoming synchronized. But from here it appears that there can only be a decline, a falling away. It is haunted by the thought of its own disappearance, just as the fading winter sun is burnt out by 2 o'clock, and already has a premonition of the lengthy shadows it will cast. This perfection cannot be consciously designed by a political system or even by religion since it depends , crucially, on the awareness of our fittedness with all that has passed in the universe, a sense of not being estranged from oneself or from the times we live in. And that type of self-assuredness is fragile, temporary, and not something that can be aimed for or re-constructed once it has passed; it is pure gift.

There was a time when I was and you were not, when I looked for fossils on the lot next to the library and threw stones whilst you slept in your mother's peace unaware; a time when you will say "I am" when I cannot, and you will look at photographs of your generations, perhaps throw some stones back. Is that now? Is time another name for irreducible distance? There was a time when you hopped about on the cracks in the cement, like a high-wire acrobat, ate strawberry jelly, played by the sea. If time heals all wounds then there was a time when time was not time.