on time
“You cannot step in the same river once.” ~ Chuang Tzu (maybe)
The weather has changed again.
After so many days of the children running outside barefoot, talking about Spring. After a roof and walls went up on the outbuilding so large I think we could almost move into it. After surveying the damage of the last big freeze and being very grateful to still have some kale. After days of sun and wind and hawks and owls calling in the big trees.
We woke to the sound of drizzling rain.
The weather bounces like a yoyo. Or maybe it’s a boomerang. There’s a chance of snow tonight. I welcome it, having known through those balmy days that Winter was still underneath it all.
Welcoming the change seems the best option, now and always.
The seasons unroll themselves, cresting at times in wonderful moments of full expression, then dipping back into shadows or shades of the season behind, or to come.
Sort of like children. We watch them crawl out of their baby fat. They spring up like weeds, trying on every characteristic in their genetic code as they grow, amazing and challenging and delighting us all at once. Just when a behavior seems to have arrived to stay, it is gone again. Like the open toothless smile of an infant, so fleeting. One of the perks of being a mother, for sure, is to still be able to see the baby inside the person who grows out of it.
And I see myself in them too, as I was or might have been. I see in them fragments, gestures, flashes of who I am, and have been. They are not me, and I am not them, but we are present in each other in a way that, though constant, always changes.
It helps remind me of who I might be now, too. (It is all too easy to lose track of myself – a sense of myself – in the care of feeding of a family.)
There, in the old photos, I recognize the baby, the little girl, the young woman. I remember being her, sometimes.
What is it that holds together all these people we have been?
Time.
Slippery substance, mostly of our own creation, that one. But there it is, running through the seasons, through the years, stringing clouds, rain, sun, days, nights, laughter, anger, tears and hugs all together in an endless beaded string.
Some days, I have a rough ball of clay to thread onto that string as it passes. Other days, there is a delicate iridescent pearl. Both add texture and depth to the un-finishable creation of life.
The big question is – what will we do with our precious time on this drizzly winter day?