Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

~~T.S. Eliot

A life is not a thick, black linear time line that etches itself bit by plodding bit across a personal landscape. Last week weaves itself into this one. The past holds the possibility of the present and memory remains fluid moving backward and forward …not a stationery entity that describes the past, but one that creates new realities whether we are ready for them or not. As time has moved on for me, and I am becoming old, time has become a presence without days. It has become less and less important to sort through events chronologically. What comes into the perceived march of days instead is a weaver’s hand …colors of a departure and events of a return …strands of my life throwing themselves through the warp of the loom without the narrow conception of the order of days …weft colors that show up here … fade to nothingness …only to resurface in another place. The shuttle works deftly …sometimes so quickly in the heat of gathering what might easily fall into disuse …sometimes slowly with care and thought. The shuttle never stops as I am stretched taut upon the loom until one day I will be all of one piece …a finished work of texture and color in all dimensions until another pattern using the strands of the last will come into its place for the next.

My journey with aloneness began in middle age. Early on I asked myself a lot of questions about the march of time. What would become of me in death? Would there be a funera l…would anyone cry over my ashes? Would anyone remember me? Time alone in a middle space where one day flowed without chaos into the next brought me to an empty clearing without questions that would change nothing. I will live. I will die. There is nothing beyond that fact that troubles me …not the absence of a pot of flowers on a grave …not words said about me after my death. I have grieved so hard and long for losses through what I understand in this reality as eternal death and worldly separation that I am relieved that no one will go through that for me. I have accepted that I am subject to a natural process congruent with all living things and will die perhaps unheard, perhaps unseen. Each day I am open a little more to growing beyond the force of my own drives even though this relinquishment is one of the most difficult I am making …just to allow life as it is to take me in and on.

My mother once told me a story. A four-year-old was sitting on her lap. The little girl turned to her and touched her hair, “Miss Louise, why is your hair white?” My mother replied, “Because, dear, I am old.” The little girl thought for a moment and then asked, “Miss Louise, how do you get old?” How do we get old indeed?

All we know of time is that time passes. What do we know of what carries us along into life? All we can know is that life is good. The flowering quince outside the kitchen window is blooming in the sun in what we have been taught is morning. What else is there to know about time?