Advent, 2010

The First Sunday of Advent, Anno Domini 2010

The lessons of childhood, when well and lovingly taught over the course of many growing seasons become the traditions of a lifetime, no matter how far the student may travel from home in the seasons of adulthood. So it was that today as I thought about many things, my sub-conscious suddenly informed me "this is the first Sunday of Advent." In the congreations of my childhood, fellow Lutherans watched solemnly as the first candle of the wreath was lit, and the organist began the introductory notes of "Come O Come Emmanuel!" I am sure that in all the existing Lutheran congregations of the world, Advent wreaths were lit today, and the first chords of that strangely melancholic entreaty to the Christ Child sounded through vaulted halls of worship.

I am many decades removed from my childhood in human years, and light-years removed in terms of human thought, perceptions of the Universe, and the place human beings occupy in the grand scheme of things. But still, some years more strongly than others, my inner being will harken back to those old days of other family and friends, softly flickering candle light, and words spoken with a sweetly familiar accent. So, memories of those times came to me today, unbidden, but welcome, and I will prepare to enjoy this holiday season with an inner ear listening to what it is those voices from another time have to tell me.

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.

A Samhain Missed and A Bauble of Time

Driving west across the late Autumn Indiana countryside, we are moving directly into a most stunning sunset - one of those seed crystal moments of nature in which a commonplace phenomenon blends so precisely into the whole of the consciousness that time seems to expand, contract and slow down.. One moves outside the realm of the chronological passing of time, and into an inexplicable, very sharp awareness that this "moment in time" is not of the same quality as the time measured by the ticking of a clock. For me, this particular sideways moment of existential sensation was heightened by the song coming from the radio, and my daughter's comment, "This is the perfect song for this sunset - Whiter Shade of Pale."

And it was quite so - the the mystery of the lyrics against languid tempo of the music, phased me into another notch of the "chambered nautilus" and an overwhelming sense of being witness to the incomprehensible came to me as the creation of the Universe from the Big Bang to the death of the dinosaurs flashed from my sub-conscious into my mind's eye. I caught at the fact that in all this Cosmic Cooking, the soup had boiled down to a single instant in the golden-stubbled harvest fields of a North American country-side, bathed in magenta sunlight swirled in the psychedelic lyrics of a particularly appropriate '60s rock tune. I asked my daughter if she had paused to reflect that for the two of us, all the eons of creation had boiled down to this moment in time ... this precise, surreal glimpse of how it all is. The answer came without a pause for composition of thought - "Yes." We were traveling on November 2, the last day directly related to the End-of-Summer days celebrated since the mists of time and now co-opted by the Western Church as its own Holy Day. It was an All Souls Day Sunset which brought me a vision of the cosmos as a Whiter Shade of Pale.

This year, for reasons which are buried in the "real world" and trying to find enough time to do everything that was required to be done, October slipped by without me. I knew it was October -
the most magical, exciting month of the Wheel, and I kept telling myself that I had plenty of time and help to prepare for a wonderful Samhain Celebration. I am October born, and even before I "knew" about October, and the Wheel of the Year and the special beliefs and celebrations of my ancestors, I KNEW about late Autumn, October and the special magic of darkening days that rules the world and the nature of time. The magic is strongest on Halloween and lasts until after the Winter Solstice. During these days the quality of time literally changes. The ancient Greeks showed their awareness when they gave two names to "time." Chronos is used to describe time in a quantitative way --- the kind of time we measure with a clock, and which can make us early or late, and somehow we're never able to quite manage it properly. But "Kairos" is a totally other concept ... Kairos is the quality of time which nearly all ancient cultures understood ... it is the "time which is not time," and can be the "time between." It can suspend the passage of the Cronos at certain times of the year, and allow us to travel between the worlds. It can be the quality of time which supports a mystic vision or an existential insight, or the gift of traveling in time on a vision quest .... and it is true that this quality of time is more accessible, more available and more insistent during the time of growing darkness; that time when daylight begins to grow short as the the Sun travels south of the equator toward the darkest, shortest day of the Wheel. It is the most magical time of the year, the time when the veil is the thinnest, when synchronicity is more obvious and when people the world over join in unexpected ways to share the same thoughts and experiences.

This year, a friend, who I know only through her internet blog and her magical painting, has written a wonderful piece about "The Time Thief" which struck me with its reference to the elusive nature of time, the idea that "animals" also experience Kairos, and that on the day she decided to experience gathering time, she learned that the old spirits who had come across for Halloween were still aware of Kairos .... Her name is Jackie Morris, and she has graciously allowed me to share her blog entry in my own blog. Jackie posted this on Halloween, October 31, but Kairos was at work in my favor and I found the post on November 2, All Souls Day.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Time Thief

Yesterday I spent most of the day gathering together the lost hours from all of the beings that are in and around my house. ( In the UK we have a curious system of time, run by clocks, where once a year the hands of time are turned backwards at 2 am.)

There were four human hours, all different. Each of the hours I caught in a net and moulded into a solid small bead. There were four dog hours that looked a little lazy and ill formed and four cat hours, bright beads like amber. In corners, almost hidden, I found complicated, soft spider hours, fast and scuttling mouse hours and outside there were feathered, drowsy flicks of bird hours, huddled in bundles in warm places. The hours were all from two in the morning. The birds had been sleeping.

It was a warm night, so to add to my string there were aerymice hours from the fast furious hunters of the starlit sky. These were dark, almost so dark that you could not see them, only visible from eye corners. And there were owl hours, curved like claws with moonlight a crescent in their form, somewhere.

And because it was All Hallows Eve there were other hours around from people and creatures who had lived in the house far back to when the stones were gathered from the fields around and shaped into walls. These were the hardest to catch.

Each bright bead formed from stray hours was different in character from the next. Each I gathered to myself, greedy to capture more time for when I needed it. As I strung the hours together the weight of time grew heavy, the hours all lay, coiled around and upon each other, each more beautiful than the last.

By the end of the day I was tired but the moonjar was full and I had hopes of how to use all the time I had trapped. I have so much work to do. I have to finish A Rhyme In Time by the end of January so that it can go to press to be published in the autumn of next year. I have some other work that I must push forward on as my part of this is one of the building blocks of a major project and it cannot progress without some drawings, some paintings. There are paintings that I wish to do, friends who I want to spend my time with and I would like to get out and walk more. And above all I would like time to just sit and think, either at home in the silence of the house or on the hillside, above the sea.
So, I thought I would test my time machine. A mouse hour would be good. Small, and round, it flickered with a nervous energy as I popped it into my mouth and swallowed it down.
What happened next was hard to explain. Mice live in a different time zone from humans. I know that now. An hour was like a year, but I could not use it wisely. Instead I hurried fast around the house, nervously pulling at this and at that, jumping at every loud noise, a minute seeming to be an hour, heart beating faster than the ticking clock. A bird hour was more elegant, but no more use to a human. I just wanted to be out of the house and could almost feel the place where my wings should be, and I yearned for the sky. The hour of a bird trapped in a human throws itself against the cage of the body in its desire to be free.

It had been a good idea, had made a beautiful collection, but it would never work.
You just can't capture time, although, if you are lucky you can steal a little of someone else's with an elegant pattern of words.

Jackie Morris is an illustrator, artist, and writer who lives in St. Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales.
She is a mother, a keeper of cats, baker of bread and a good neighbor. Her home is a cottage
near the cliffs above the sea and she writes a personal blog:

http://www.drawingalineintime.blogspot.com/

And contributes (sometimes) to a second and even more magical blog:

http://www.wethreecats.blogspot.com/