Monday, October 25, 2010

HOW REAL IS TIME?


At this time last year my partner Standing Deer and I were just getting set up in Cottonwood, Arizona. It seems as if we are still there. We returned to Taos just before summer but I'm finding my experience of time to be completely out of order. While last year is like yesterday, I have little recollection of the sequence of events over the past five months. Something significant is shifting my experience of timing.

I'm also finding it difficult to remember the sequence of important events in my personal history. At one moment it seems as if I'm in the Denver of 20 years ago, or in Boulder on the mall with one of my friends from long ago. But the experience is not of long ago but as if its happening right now. I can feel the air, hear the breeze shuffling the leaves and smell the earth. These experiences come with a profound, almost unbearable nostalgia. At times I'm feeling crazy because the nostalgia can overtake me at anytime.

I take inventory in an attempt to get my life lined up again on the horizontal time line and discover that certain times mean very little to me and others are so loaded with emotion and yearning that I can hardly bear it. But what is the difference? As I go deeper I notice that the emotional times are attached to unfinished processes. They have to do with something significant to my sense of direction and of having lost the trail, usually by the interference of an external event.

Does this have to do with the fabled approach of the 2012 end of the Mayan time cycle? I don't trouble myself very much with prophecies and predictions. We are after all co-creators of our own future. But I'm puzzled by what I don't know about my own experience. I know that I have made some significant spiritual/emotional breakthroughs in the past month. This year is heading toward it's end and I'm sensing unknown chapter coming up. In preparation perhaps, I've been reliving unfinished parts and past passions. I'll cross metaphors here and say that I'm shedding the skin of my past and it feels very important to do it now. My 12th house intuition says its time to restock my toolbox. Most people my age are settling down to enjoy their senior years but I feel that my whole life has been preparation for something that is about to begin.