This week my friend led a meditation on time... She began: "Close your eyes for a few minutes and contemplate time. (Pause)

What do you feel when you hear the word time? What energy does that word have for you? Where in your body do you feel it?"

How you experience time can be the difference between feeling stressed or relaxed. Another friend told a story this week of being stranded at a McDonald's in a poor neighborhood, where his sister had car trouble. He waited at the restaurant for four hours for help to come. There was a security man at the entrance to Mc Donald's. My friend became fully engaged in watching this man greet with friendliness each and every person who walked through the door. This attitude of openness was contagious, and my friend, who forgot about checking the time, was changed by the experience.

Meditation practice itself is a counterweight to the recent belief in real time– "the actual time during which something takes place"– as the only kind of time that counts. Can time be divided into neat independent sections, and be thus designated as what is real? How can one moment, which vanishes more quickly than the time it takes to utter the word, be separated from another moment?

This meditation on time has continued for me all week, as I have been reading T S Eliot's Four Quartets and studying the work of the artist and calligrapher, Ben Shahn. If you want to have some winter reading– a morning meditation– take even one stanza of Burnt Norton each day. It is ambrosia for the spirit:

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Burnt Norton I – T S Eliot

That one phrase is packed with meaning– for if what might have been and what has been is always present, then the past is not fixed. So much depends on what we do with our experience, how we bring it into our awareness. There is a thread of accepting everything. This is where healing and transformation occurs. And nothing is left out that cannot be restored. And nothing can be left out.

There are resonances with Ben Shahn's work, in his hand written and illustrated version of Ecclesiastes:*

That which has been is now; and that which is to be has already been...
Ecclesiastes 3:15

And the well known phrase:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven...
Ecclesiastes 3:1

illustration from *Ecclesiastes* by Ben Shahn

Eliot invites us in:

...Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner, through the first gate...

There it is, what Joseph Campbell named the call to adventure. The image of the first gate–will we accept the invitation and walk through? Just the word follow suggests that there are others ahead of us. Where is the line we are afraid to cross? The door we are hesitating in front of?

Winter is a time for listening to this call, for expanding our world and our possibilities by paying attention. Joseph Campbell reminded us that this idea, shall we follow?, is not new, and we are not alone:

We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world.”

The awareness that we are a part of every one– those who have come and those who will come– and part of every thing under the heaven, alters how we see, how we experience time. How we draw, paint, sing or make a mark. For the heroes of all time have gone before us. I am indebted to the heroes I quote here, for leaving their footprints, as I stumble my way through and try to make sense of fall turning to winter again. How quickly the seasons turn... Autumn is a reminder, in breathtaking color, of impermanence, of dear ones lost, and of growing older.

Once again, Eliot's language takes you into the natural world uplifted by vision:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud...

...for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

And the insistence on coming further in:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

For the leaves were full of children (sigh). What are your meditations on time? I'd love to hear from you.

* My classes in 2018 are inspired by the calligraphy and art of Ben Shahn. We have added another class for St Louis in March:

http://www.lauriedoctor.com/new-events/2017/9/24/absence-presence-i-st-louis-mo-mar-3-5-2018