FootprintsintheWind.com

Time is a green rubber ball—distorted when bounced or caught—extended when thrown—seemingly prickly with alternate sides—all one side. What holds the ball together? What is outside it? Does what’s outside or what’s inside hold it as one? Or is it many?

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1598

How the Zen master teaches is these sparse words, allowing the student to find his or her own path. The master is teaching way, and traveling way, not the forms and shapes the master has found. This makes supreme sense, since each person has their own way. This is what Tao Te Ching was about: pointing in the direction of the way, but not putting up guide-posts.

Please pass it on.

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A brief survey of what time means to the peoples. I see a globe with these things spiraling around it, spawning, becoming one another. Maybe a Dymaxion map, or an apple peeled:

time heals ↔ it does not
time is a noun ↔ time is adverbial, modifies
time for happening ↔ time for consensus to emerge
private time ↔ (semi-) public time
serial access time ↔ random access time
passing time ↔ point or event time
taking time ↔ people time
low context time ↔ high context/holistic time
masculine time ↔ feminine time
fast rhythm ↔ slow
spread out ↔ compacted
low meaning time ↔ high
low relationship/connection time ↔ high
low responsibility time ↔ high
low discretion time ↔ high
highly scheduled ↔ lower
numbered statistical Dollared ↔ particulars to decipher
standardized homogenized time ↔ environment specific
full productive time ↔ living, encouraging, loving
make the day count ↔ use the day rightly, artfully
people as machine cogs ↔ human spirit given play
time absolute ↔ time malleable, relative, bottomless, formless
individual ↔ close knit
closed score ↔ open score
words/maps real ↔ territory, beneath self real
actor, action, goal ↔ blending
success, failure, self ↔ empty, nameless
left brain ↔ gestalts
words ↔ actuality, silence, movement
ego ↔ eliminate ego
art as creation ↔ art as insight
minds changing ↔ hearts dependable
time binds to projects ↔ time binds to people ↔ time bends
time to act ↔ time to ponder
meeting of minds ↔ meeting of hearts
ends, discrete quanta ↔ blending, flexing, learning
arrow of time ↔ reversible
individual ↔ group
centralized ↔ decentralized
lines ↔ circular, spherical
running out ↔ regenerative
mechanical ↔ organic
beginning, middle, end ↔ beginning, muddle, beginning…
micro units (seconds, minutes) ↔ macro (days, seasons, eons)
time dragging (bad times) ↔ time flying (good times)
time as enemy ↔ as friend
time as memory ↔ as happening
time as jailer ↔ as freer
time as becoming ↔ as being
time as consciousness ↔ something larger
external time ↔ inner
single causation thread ↔ multiple
duality ↔ singleness, wholeness
fixed time ↔ possibility of expanding and contracting time
time flows around us ↔ concentration obliterates time
working out actions in writing ↔ all in head, complete
sequentially (Beethoven) ↔ all at once (Mozart)
discrete units ↔ unified entity
arithmetic time (to age 35) ↔ logarithmic time (after 60)
doing to ↔ transaction, conversation
high body temperature (fast clocks) ↔ low (time speeds)
pre-experienced, imaginal ↔ as it comes
ruts ↔ new
variety ↔ regularity
gross body cues ↔ subtle
unconscious breathing entrainment ↔ attended
ignorant of group rhythms ↔ entering
out of time and rhythm ↔ congruent
conscious source ↔ unverbalized source
facts ↔ message
audience ↔ participants
one way ↔ feedback
own beat ↔ entrained beats
missed coherence ↔ discovered
discrete ↔ continuous
time schedules ↔ time as rhythm
unrelated actions ↔ related people
one side of body ↔ all included
one set of ideas ↔ all included
one rhythm ↔ syncopated too
longer vowels ↔ shorter
plan ↔ right thoughts
isolate people ↔ bring together
get job done ↔ cultivate talents
cause and effect ↔ synchronicity
conscious ↔ collective unconscious
now ↔ history
formal ↔ informal
sender, receiver, message ↔ none and one
talking to, at ↔ conversing, standing in the face
analysis ↔ synthesis
time is about doing ↔ now ia bout being
perfectibility ↔ life as it is, fuller
exterminate/hate other ↔ know one another
future is unreal ↔ future and past with us now
time is out of awareness ↔ make explicit
opposites ↔ related
explicit ↔ situational
attend things ↔ attend spaces
as long as it happens ↔ exact moment it happens is significant
separate events ↔ bridges
light ↔ shimmering, pregnant darkness
time flows ↔ window in time
single steps ↔ process
one end achieved ↔ artfully done
lines ↔ curves
completion ↔ dissolution beyond completion
constant, continual ↔ pauses, intervals of variable lengths
nothing new under sun ↔ transformations, emergences
imposed from outside ↔ arising
homogeneous time and team ↔ diversity
attains stated known outcome ↔ new is added, subtracted
progress ↔ relationships stable
time is real ↔ time is fabrications of minds
time is outside ↔ nervous systems drive one another
success is plan achieved ↔ achievement of plan is failure
time can be managed ↔ I manage myself relative to my time

:- Doug.

At the reception last night, I saw a couple of old people who were sitting at tables, staring off into nothing. It seemed to me they lacked the rhythm with the people around them, were no longer in sync. Perhaps they could not hear well enough. They were perhaps “in their own world.”

It was difficult to see the rhythms, the entrainment with all that activity. I need to train myself to look for these things.

Perhaps the stage tonight will reveal something. And people in the waiting area. I think the easier place to look may be when people are in conversation with one another, and the people around observing the conversation.

:- Doug.

We have poetic time, which is also beyond profane time. It flies, it reaches back, it reaches into our psyches shadowing us. Convergent, divergent, snaking, devious, and straight on to the core, coeur, corps. Few and fewer words to say more and. Beats and rhythms and flying together are somehow a time out of.

:- Doug.

Here’s another time: story time. It is beyond clock time (profane time). Story time stands still. It might actually go back and forth, and in 360 degrees, don’t you think? It brings the future near, obliquely. It harvests the day and the worries of it, at a different angle. All are wrapped in a snug blanket of now…and never…and ever.

:- Doug.