TIME

 Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. The clock on the kitchen wall is almost exploding. It gets louder as I try to ignore it.  I never heard it while Standing Deer sat on his throne in the living room watching videos on TV. Now the passage of seconds, minutes, hours, and days is propelled like an arrow from the clock to my mind.

I just had my 79^th birthday, (I almost wrote 89^th, a slip I’ve been making for months).  Normally people my age don’t accidentally add ten years to their age, but I’ve been very aware of the speed of time in the days since I turned 75. However, it isn’t with regret, sadness or fear that I became aware of the the speed with which years advance. I feel a freedom and detachment that I would never have anticipated even three years ago. It’s as if I were looking at the earth’s spinning surface from a remote island in the sky. Everything seems present or soon will be. Whatever time is it greets us at the beginning of our ride on this spinning ball.  Although I’ve had a lot of time, I find it mysterious and multidimensional. We use our Earth, Moon, Sun and stars as a measuring system, yet the essence is a mystery.

Most of the earth's people have already moved beyond reach of this physical, measured world and become members of its history. I’m wondering if we just attend this three-dimensional seminar of a few short earth cycles from time to time primarily to brush up on the principles of consciousness and responsibility or possibly learn about them for the very first time. Eventually, I hope to move through the lower grades and enroll in graduate school. Could it be that our earthly school systems are based on an underlying cosmic model?

Standing Deer (Pba-quin-nee-e, or PQ) was a hard user. His physical body was small. He and I wore almost the same shoe size, he had strong but beautiful hands, and the muscles of a cat, and he carried himself big. However, he was careless with hardware, including his body. It took him longer than most people to discover that he wasn’t immortal.

Now that PQ has moved beyond the vibrational atmosphere of this visible world, my self-identity has done a fast replay of all the previous roles and stages of my life. As each one passed, I said no, been there done that. Let’s try one I haven’t used before. There were so many years lived secretly or as the frame for someone else’s picture. However, it’s an intuitive guess about what comes next. Honestly though, I’m ready to take some dusty tools out of the closet. Some of them have never been used before and others were almost forgotten.

 I've been cast out the door of a life I was quite comfortable with and yet I always knew the comfort had a time limit. A pleasant routine becomes delicious when you know it may end without notice. You take a memory snapshot each day. The simple things are the most addictive. I miss seeing the back of his head above the couch as he watches the afternoon news while I fix supper. His laugh when a joke strikes his funny bone, the breakfast smoothy we had with the morning news at the beginning of each day, and especially the happy hug when he met me in the kitchen ready for morning coffee. On nice summer mornings we took our coffee to the patio where he liked to talk to the birds, and they answered. In the afternoon, there were trips to the grocery store and post office. He invariably saw someone he knew from the Pueblo, went to high school with or was a pal he made in the art world. Of course, Taos was his hometown not only in his lifetime but for generations back.

And yet we were happiest in Cottonwood Arizona. I’ve tried to understand why that is. Perhaps it was because we were free to be new. It was like being born again without karma. Yet we never gave up our Taos connection. That wasn’t the point. The ripples in the lake of time ran free there, without conflicting patterns. It was a new life based on discovery rather than habit. We had, and now I have, a storage shed full of remnants of our dream to return to Cottonwood someday.

We got together too late to fulfill many dreams, but we had a delicious taste of what we want when we get another round. PQ always had an off center sense of judgement. It took me a long time to recognize this.  However, his bad choices had a trickster element attached. He once picked out an aspen tree for me, and it turned out to be a cottonwood sapling, or he decided to walk around the grocery store with me, accept visitors and sing a day after leaving the hospital which launched the beginning of the end. I no longer blame him for this strange trait. In the final cut, it turned out right. He was following a different script and the results served an alternative purpose. For instance, I had decided to plant aspens because of my small garden space, but unknown to him, I always had a soul connection with cottonwoods.

I see and must accept that he left when he needed to go. We both had plans for the future, but his body wore out and his soul knew he couldn’t do justice to the life he came to live.

To be continued, but I don’t know when or where.