Time, the destroyer ….
Out on my bike this morning, this beautiful morning. Got home, wrote this in my journal.
Out on my bike this morning, this beautiful morning. Got home, wrote this in my journal.
……………………………………………
Fuego erupted 6 months ago. 100s died. The ash is all gone here in Antigua. Washed away by time’s steady hand, her hard falling afternoon and nightly rains and strong winds …..
That’s time the destroyer at work. She heals all things but also harms all things, in time. Her own sweet time.
I look out each day at the 3 volcanoes in the distance. Agua, the beautiful one, conic and colossal. Motherly. Acotenango, camel humped, silently fuming like a teenage boy. Fuego, puffing, ejaculating and firy, the older brother always in trouble. Resentful of something we’ll never know.
All nature is an allegory for our own life, lives. One who knows nature, knows a lot about life and human “nature”. Violent storms teach us about our fears and the hidden forces lurking in all matter. Fields of flowers tell us about the beauty of our lives and also their temporality. A view, like the view of these volcanoes I look out upon — tells me about the immensity of life, of that which is alive and that we are wrong to see just the “human” in this world as primary and all important.
We are but a fleck of dust on the shoulder of what scientists call matter or space. A fleck of dust that can be blown away, annihilated by destroyer time, at any time.
This is not to say we aren’t important. I prefer to see eternity in even a grain of volcanic ash and to see each and every “thing” in space and time as very necessary. All mathematical truth and scientific equations must be beautiful — didn’t say that huckster, beautiful huckster Einstein when he was here? In the same vein,every little thing must be necessary for this world to exist, all and everything has a purpose and place. A job to do. Or nothing would exist. Death, smiles, hot dogs, thoughts, pin cushions, volcanic eruptions …. they are all necessary for the world to exist in time and space.
And me, this tiny fleck of dust ushered from an eruption of love and desire? My job is as Norman Mailer said, “to bring home the bacon”. To bear children and sweet juice for the world to taste in the form of word and idea.
I’ve now started. I’ve always been starting and will forever be starting. Until time the destroyer decides on another form of “every hair in its place” and I’m expunged, forgotten and sent where even the Plato’s, Shakespeare’s and Baudelaire’s suffer. The annals of the forgotten, relics left as memories in time’s basement.