Dewdney - Soul of the world: unlocking the secrets of time

You mean now?

Yogi Berra, after being asked what time it was

The night was cooltoo cool to stay outside for very longyet a slight mildness in the air pledged warmer evenings to come. In the twilight I could make out the long rectangle of my lawn and a dark strip of earth where winter flowerbeds ran along the east fence towards the silhouette of the garage with its peaked roof. Two stubborn patches of snow glowed whitely at its foot. Then something stirred, breathlessly close. Something gathered and clotted in the darkness near the top of the fence. It fluttered with an inky, soft movement made eerily precise by its silence.

A bird had alighted. I couldnt see it at first. I searched along the top rail and there it wasI met the full intensity of its eyes before I could name itan owl, a small one, perched on the top of a fence post less than twelve feet from where I stood. We stared at each other, both motionless, me in spellbound astonishment and the owl broadcasting its hooded, imperious and unblinking gaze. I wanted to get closer. I think I even had the naive idea that the owl might hop onto my arm if I offered it. But after I had taken a few cautious steps it rose up as soundlessly as it had arrived, floating up into the stars above a neighbours house and disappearing into the night. How marvellous! This mysterious bird had blessed my yard.

That night, for one moment in time, the owl and I were aware of each otherwe met in an enchanted encounter that ended too quickly for me. Something ancient bonded us. Blood and miracle and twilight had combined in a single charged alchemy, and I had, briefly, been in the presence of magnificence, of nights own beak and talons. Out of darkness, out of the endlessly random permutations of time and place, a wonder had occurred. Time had stood still. The owl, with its moondial face, had brushed its wing over the flow of time. For those few seconds I had been completely in the momentoblivious of future and past, my senses alive to the night, the owl, the beating of my own heart.

The next day I got out my old set of vinyl transfer letters and stuck the word owl in one-inch-tall letters at the top of the fence post. I wanted to fix the place where the owl had landed, and I wanted to memorialize this special moment in time. I had experienced a present so spellbinding it was if an invisible door had opened onto eternity.

Time gives and time takes away. That evening has been carried off by time, along with all the other events of that day and that week. The dust-speckled snow that lingered for few more days in the shadow of the garage, like the terminal moraine of a diminutive glacier, has disappeared, and the green tongues of crocuses have begun to poke through the surface of my garden. A new season has started. This year on March 20 at 7:34 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, spring officially began. Our timekeepers, trained over the millennia to capture the exact instant of equinoxes and solstices, announced the subtle moment of transitionthe beginning of a new season and a signpost along earths 584-million-mile journey around the sun. Yet the cycles of the seasons themselves roll through the calendar like cogs caught in times great wheel.

In my yard the incremental passage from winter to spring seems gradual, but Im already behind the seasonal schedule. My lawn needs raking and the bricks that line the flowerbeds have buckled in the frost and need resetting. I tell myself that I can do these chores next week, though the rising greenery in my garden has an urgent timetable that will eventually force me to act. I hear spring ticking like a clock. Is time against me or is it on my side? What does it have in mind for me?

Time is more than just one damn thing after another, as an anonymous wit once quipped. It is more than a sequence of events. Without time there is nothing. Time is both the dance floor and the music. Everything that moves and everything that seems unmoved is choreographed by time. It is everywhere. The world we live in and the universe that surrounds it could not exist without the architecture of time. Only time, with its one-way flow, allows us to accomplish anything. Even thought depends on timeif time stopped, we would become nothing more than frozen, unconscious statues. Perhaps that is why the Greeks thought that their god of time, Cronos, presided over thought itself. Time is like an animating breath. Time, with its promise of a continual future, is also the wellspring of hope, for only within time can our imaginings be realized.

Often it feels as though time gushes, that it pushes me up and I hover like a ball floating on top of a fountain or a geyser. I can feel the tremendous energy of it, and of life also. The past few afternoons have been bright and warm beneath a hazy blue sky. Yesterday I saw the first butterfly of the season, sunning itself on the back of my house beneath the kitchen window. It had just emerged from hibernation and it basked, sensuously opening and closing its purple and gold wings as if inhaling the warmth. Its internal clock, and the warmth, had awakened it. Does time flow more quickly for the butterfly? Do the windows of its compound eyes open onto the same temporal world as my own? Does a sunny spring afternoon stretch for years? Even to me, it seems that time slows down in the spring, as the days grow longer. Time bends and stretches. We imagine that time speeds straight as an arrow, yet sometimes it seems to circle back on itself like watchwork gears. In my garden its toothed wheels mesh with toothed wheels in the heart of the crocuses blooming gold and purple above the muck.

TIME PRESENT

In the flow of time the owl, a symbol of wisdom and memory, is now itself a memory. The point of our rendezvous is past, long past, growing more distant each day. The only thing that hasnt changed is my small monument to our encounter, the three letters on the fence post. But memory also weathers the rush of time and keeps me company, though not such close company as the present. The present, with its corner in the future, is always opening onto something new. The American nineteenth-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote,

The Present, the Present is all thou hast

For thy sure possessing;

Like the patriarchs angel hold it fast

Till it gives its blessing.

He was referring to the passage from the Old Testament where the patriarch Jacob struggled with an angel at night. For me the owl was like Jacobs angel, and although it would be a stretch to say I wrestled with it in the darkness, our encounter did bestow something wonderful: the knowledge that there are extraordinary beings out there, wild and exotic, making their way in the world, and that my neighbourhood, unremarkable as it may appear, is home to some of them.

But the owls visit gave me something else as well: an experience of a unique now, a single bell-note of coincidence that retuned my relationship to the present. And Whittiers quote is essentially about seizing the moment, the only time we really have. The payoff of our wrestling match with time is the promise of greater productivity and awareness, the opposite of wasting time. Whittiers admonishment is a familiar one, though we are such procrastinators and dreamers that living in the present seems almost impossible, a feat for Zen monks and meditating gurus rather than people with careers, children and homes. As Samuel Johnson lamented in Rasselas, No mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments.

Given that most of us arent Zen monks, how do