Slow time

 

Pierre Bonnard, "Corner Table", 1920

Goodness.  I could have sworn that there weren't but two weeks since I last wrote, but here it is three.  I could say that time flies, but that would be misrepresenting these past days for me.  Time, like the seasons, has slowed.

These mornings, I'm in bed long passed when, not but a month ago, I'd be up before dawn, feet slipping to the floor, the day calling out some urgency.  I still wake early, but stay under the covers, letting thoughts surface instead of me...like scenes from a movie coming into focus, memories, constructions of new and old possibility.

Then, still resting on pillows, I read some...this morning the last part of Nella Larson's Passing, which I'd picked up from the library yesterday.  I check mail, check the weather (it's cold...still below freezing), the instinct to get up and dress lagging.

Writing this post now, showered and sweatered, sitting in my chair in the front room as the sun streams across the floor, I hear the clock strike 9.  Nine o'clock.  I'd be halfway through errands or chores or art or a walk by now in the warmer seasons.

I'm slow during the day, too, the signals to the brain announcing the next thing to do with the bowing formality of a footman required never to rush.  I deliberate, do smallest things possible, one by one, walk the same routes, until I settle down to a movie and knitting, and then to bed again to read, and fall asleep.

Even this minute, words unfold between spaces you can't see, spaces of time in which I am regarding with slow intent the walls and floor around me...the art, mostly; three cards I've saved from the holidays which I can't put out of sight yet, so part of the room they've become; that sun, equally tardy, for this flash of light would have slipped around the corner of the house by now.

Yesterday late afternoon, my neighbor Maureen came over to work on what she, excited, described as a "vision card"...a collage of what we would like the new year to look like.  Spread among scissors, glue, pens, paper, old magazines, our choices of images seeming vast, but we were remarkably focused.  Hers was a declaration of voices to be heard, environments to be saved and treasured, family and community to keep.  Mine (while certainly I value those things, as well), became a window through which silver-lined visions of sky, desert, ocean, night, a smeared moon, shelter, trees (trees, of course...my own emblem...I draw or cut them out without a conscious thought).  A tray of guest-intentioned treats made its place.  Peace, a white dove with a silver branch, comes in from the left; another, silvered as well, holds the heart of a shadowy woman, its still point.  I am inside looking out to all that.  Hope is a pane of clear glass between.

Closing in on myself seems to be the theme of this wintery January.  I don't bother to wonder why.  It's just the way it is.