ON TIME

I’m anticipating with great pleasure my sabbatical this term. Although I enjoy teaching, I find it that if I have more time I can teach more systematically people other than students. Or people interested in what we call ’weird stuff’. As I like to think of myself as a reader – I read books, Tarot, pictures, children, animals, the universe, stones and water – I find that it helps people to know that there are others in the world who appreciate their time on a level that's not culturally time-bound. We all have an intuitive knowledge about the fact that time is significant, but we rarely have this knowledge consolidated – such knowledge often gets to be perceived as some cosmic gobbledygook. So, we either doubt too much, or we believe in nonsense too much. Here, what I have to offer is this: we are here to pay attention – or so the Zen Buddhists say, or so the Shamans say, or so Bach says, or so the mathematicians say, or so we all say.

To arrive at any conclusion takes time. Neither intelligence nor thought contribute to enhancing the nuance of understanding that time and space alone create. The impatient ones, the ones who even want a reward for their blunders, get a reward. We call it the world of clichés.

I’ll be globetrotting again in search of the present, away from myself, away from repeating myself to death, repeating others to death, away from the past, away from projecting fictions into the future, away from myth and symbolism. On my schedule I have new and old places to visit: London, Tromsø, Harstad, Delhi, Turku, New York, Helsinki, Olso, Copenhagen, and then back to the source, Roskilde. I will conclude a few things, but not before I get out there all the senses available to me. Get them in there as well. I’ll take the time it takes to eat and appreciate those oysters at Grand Central in New York and the roast goat in Tromsø, hear the sound of the drums pulsating at unison with ancient history in Harstad, say abracadabra with the magical Giordano Bruno in Turku, get all Aquarian with John Starr Cooke in Helsinki, greet and greet and greet the holy men in Delhi and Kurukshetra, get hit in my gut by the dust of my 1181 supernova spread all over in Oslo, step into the cathedral in Roskilde and say, I’m back, and so are my senses, or at least my sense of time.

We can’t run away from time, therefore all time is always the right time. The only thing that may be wrong in our ballooning through space is failing to make a few good distinctions. To right that wrong, it takes time. So take it. It's all you've got.