Marjorie A. Buettner...

Time Flying By

Time seems to shift and change when you are travelling; it slides down the sides of the buildings like sun-slanting shadows, melts to the ground and is absorbed like rain on a hot, cement street in the summer. You can't touch it but it is all around you--a green air after storm. Somehow it gets in your blood stream and you feel as if you were ageless and ancient at the very same time like those old, old people who have baby soft skin, who have the look of infants in their eyes. You can't touch this time but it touches you and you are absorbed by its absolute presence. Do we notice when lines appear on our skin? When dark hair changes to gray? And yet there it is--appearing as if out of nowhere: you have a new face, you have gray hair, your bones don't fit you anymore. As you step into your childhood home, you become a stranger in a strange land. The house which you grew up in has an echo to it unfamiliar; it is too small for your body as you walk through it and you feel like Alice trying to fit through a key hole. Nothing is the same and everything has changed and where is the home and that girl who you once were long ago? Is she still there observing the world revolve? Does she see it in the mirror the way her image is captured forever in a photograph of mirrors, reflecting mirrors? There you can see time flying by right outside the window--just beyond her calm, stationary face. In transit, everything is in transit, moving while you are sitting still, while you appear to be sleeping, while you are dying, breathing, changing into another form in route toward another life, a new uncharted destination. Time slides shifting and changing as you travel and yet doesn't it feel as if we were motionless all those years--caught on the train in a still point while the world outside explodes into the future...

summer dusk the river collecting the edges of the day

WHCHaibun 2010-07-10