A sense of time

I sit listening to the wind ... ... the woods are cool and quiet.

The wind blows ... brings a memory from many years ago:

The storms of early autumn had felled large trees and branches in the woods nearby. For several days the men had worked to clear away the timber. The firewood had been cut in lengths and neatly stacked to dry. What was left was in a heap of tangled brush and twigs. It was an eyesore, in the way, and in the very place I had wanted to write for the next few days.

There was no one else to clean it up, so I started with a vengeance, intending to make short shrift of it and get on with my real work. For a few hours I laboured furiously, pulling at the pile, grabbing at the ends of the largest branches, trying to disentangle the heap by sheer brute force and my accumulated animosity. I learned later that a young woodsman had returned, willing to work, but had fled in fright before the ferocity of my face and efforts.

By late morning, it was clear that nothing effective was happening. My petulant tearings and rippings at the pile finally began to slow down. Much of my irritation had worn itself off ... the woods had worked its way.

I stopped to sit on a nearby rock and knew that I must eat.

When I went back to work, it was with a different energy ... no longer impatiently pulling at the protruding limbs or trying to overturn the heap. With clippers, I began to trim whatever offered itself from the stack. In my agitation of the morning, I had not seen that it could be approached in this way.

By late afternoon, I knew there was no way that the task would be finished that day. I began to work more slowly to sink into my experience with the brush. To the right went branches, neatly stacked, ready for drying or burning. To the left, I placed little bundles of twigs to be used later as kindling.

As the shadows lengthened, a quieter rhythm emerged. The task seemed more worthy of itielf ... my real work, less pressing. I stopped before I grew too tired and, much to my surprise, began to write, as I had first ini ended, right there beside the brush.

On the morning of the second day, I awakened early with a sense of eagerness, not to finish the job of clearing, but to see what the day might bring if I offored myself to the task. At intervals I rested, with no clear plan for what must be completed that day. It was almost no surprise to find myself writing in the woods as I rested.

The day passed.

Near the middle of the third day, I became aware of something wondrous happening. My whole experience was shifting ... the molecules of time, itself, opened up before me, spreading themselves apart so that there was space and breadth amongst them ... breath to breathe within each moment.

I laid down the clippers and sat on the rock to sense the moment more fully, as I had not allowed myself to do the day before.

I saw the wind in the tallest trees slowly stir the leaves. The colours shifted from darkest greens to black ... to nearly yellow. A hush was in the woods around, as well as deep within, me. I watched there, while the sun set, then walked silently to the house.

I washed my hair and did the few things necessary to prepare for the coming week.

The next morning, as the fourth day dawned, the whole house lay in quietness. The preparations of the evening before, undertaken out of the silence, had emerged from a sense of ordering far deeper than conscious planning. What had not been done never would be missed.

When I returned to the woods to work, I carried a broom with the clippers. By noontime, all of the remaining twigs had been put into the little bundles and tied with yarn from the house, for there was no twine. I swept the ground where the brush had been, smoothing out the last bits of bark. The earth lay flat and clean again ... the grass, a pale yellow.

The wind blows ... I sit listening against a tree.

Many times, through the years, I have remembered that day. There was a sense of being deep within the doing. Rather than a driven way of pressing to complete the task, knowing every second what the next ten thousand would hold, it was as if I had slipped through a scrim into a timeless, mysterious realm ... silent ... shimmering with life.

One whole day of being, not in ordinary Chronos time, but in the sacred Kairos time of the Feminine realm. I had glimpsed a way of being in which time, itself, was sentient, quivering with its own awareness of what each moment could hold.

One moment, I had been trapped by time, cut off from myself. In the next moment, time itself was alive, connecting me to my feelings, to all things in the circle of life ... to a way of being, from long ago when the earth was still held sacred. When a woman knew that her task was necessary to the cycles of nature. Knew that her devotion within, as she fulfilled the task, reconsecrated the earth and echoed throughout the cosmos.

I lean against the tree, thinking of our needs as women. Our ordinary lives are no longer lived in nature. It is difficult, in daily life, to find the Feminine realm. The drawing of the water, the gathering of the grains no longer are performed under an open sky. Even the machines that assist a woman prevent her from holding the elemental in her hands. The sense of her task as consecrated and necessary to the cosmos is gone.

And I fear for women yet to come. For under the pressures of modern life, time has become compressed. The Feminine sense of time has all but disappeared. Yet woman cannot exist with only a linear awareness of time, for her sense of sacred Kairos time is the precious essence of life. There must be time enough for her to experience the sacredness within each moment and within herself.

How can woman redeem what was lost so long ago? For miliennia, as she was defined by man, woman developed herself in the prevailing Masculine image. But the heroic journey of the Masculine, so long clearly delineated, could not provide what was needed to complete the journey of the conscious and developed Feminine. It could not help woman return to her Archetypal roots or to the sacredness of her sense of Kairos time.

The locust tree at my back sways. I sit, trying to understand the shift in my experiencing of time. What had made time so alive? Yet, even as I try so purposefully to comprehend the shift, wondering, perhaps, if I might make it happen, the precious aliveness dies. It cannot be made to happen!

Finally I sit empty, waiting.

* * *

A single shaft of blinding sunlight pierces through the leaves ... onto the bundles of twigs lying at my feet ... touches the pages of my writing. I hold my breath as a thousand tiny sprinkles of light fill the air...