January 1, 2018

Happy New Year

I want to whisper it so I don’t wake you from your nap. It is the afternoon of the first day of 2018 as I write. Where are you now as this flickers on your screen? Is it night? What time is it as you read?

This is the designated beginning of a year, a longish clump of days, but not so long once you’ve had many. Shall we review, shall we plan ahead? I do not know how to write this to you or even who you are. I came of age during the rhythm of paper letters. Once one was sent, you knew things would change before the other read and responded. Letters carried our words bouncing like yells over valleys, the delay part of the message. Let this be my letter, then.

Dear Reader,
Since childhood, I have been poorly adapted to time, the kind found in clocks and calendars. Even into junior high, I could barely tell time on a watch. Once I could, I could not feel it the way it is told. I would drive to college and sit for hours before class, unable to plan the commute properly. The squares of class-time made no sense to me, or could not be sensed. At least not in the same way as time that was the five verses of “Just As I Am,” tomato season, the counts between thunders (“1 Mississippi”), Christmas break.

As embarrassing as my timeblindness was, I know am glad for the experience. It felt very animal, looking back to experience time through physical experience, through changes in the landscape. My work is adapted to a “fifty-minute hour” in which I sit with one or more humans in a room, hour-to-hour. But even there, closed off from the world, time bends. Some hours are fleet and others leaden with sorrow. Maybe every person carries their relationship with time with them.

Reader, I am rambling. Is that a waste of time? Are you still here/there?
What I mean to say, is how strange that we share whatever this is. A moment separated by time and screens and physical space. I hope you are well and happy. My wish is that you can enjoy whatever moment this inhabits. I’ll leave a little space here. Put yourself in a memory that makes you remember joy.
 
 
 
Happy New Year