Whether it is the tic-tock of a mechanical watch or clock or the “electronic transition frequency in the microwave, optical, or ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum of atoms” [Wikipedia] -- or the rising and setting of the sun --, time is always in reference to motion. “Change,” you may insist. And perhaps you are right? But isn’t change ultimately a matter of motion? What was this way is not that way anymore, and it--the change--happened in time. .... That’s time. Time is motion.
Here we are sitting beside a swiftly moving West coast (USA) river. We are gazing out roughly toward the other side of the river, the swift current of which is only perhaps fifty or eighty feet across. The shore on opposite side of the river appears basically un-moving, motionless, except for the action of breezes in the grasses and leaves of shrubbery and trees, which shimmer and shudder and sway to the rhythm of the changing breeze which is almost sometimes a full fledged wind. It grows still too, sometimes. Sometimes a kind of river-like flow are these grasses and leaved branches. Other times they are still, even the most delicate grasses.
But the rocks on the far shore appear as utterly still as stillness can be. Their changes and flows are on different time scales. Were we to sit here for a thousand years, ourselves un-moving, we could watch them wiggle and wobble, shudder and shimmer, flow and dissolve -- or, at least, roll into the river and be swept into the current. Even the bedrock will be alive in motion in this way, being mostly eroded into the size of boulders, rocks, pebbles and sand. If we sit here for ten or a hundred thousand years, we’ll watch the whole landscape shift in astonishing ways.
A still photo with a tripod and a rapid, sudden exposure time, will freeze all of this motion. A long exposure time will reveal a sort of blur of motion in the water and in the leaves of grass (and tree branches).
.... But what if we were to have brought a video or movie camera with us and suddenly leaped into a canoe waiting for us on the river’s edge? -- the camera remaining focused on the far shore? Now the water appears nearly still, while it is the far shore that appears to be swiftly moving. We are now basically still in relation to the flow of water in the stream, but the riverbank is now moving quickly!
By analogy, this is almost precisely what happens when we become “still” in a certain way, when we attune our awareness fully to this moment. Ordinarily, most of us experience our world as a constant torrent of change and transformation. Very little seems to hold still. As soon as whatever it is appears it begins to alter and eventually to disappear. All is flux and flow. For a while, though, we ourselves seem to be like the far shore of the river, its grasses and leaves -- but,, most importantly, it’s rocks. Especially its bedrock, the slowest moving region of the far shore. The far shore echoes the near shore of our experience. We are stable in a world of change, or so we feel and think. The swift changes are outside ourselves. And we call this flow time.
Our attention, however, is as jittery as the leaves of the grasses and branches of the trees on the far shore -- in a heavy storm, often. Our attention moves rapidly from this to that to the other thing. So does our interpretation of the arising perceptions. The whole thing is a stormy turbulence, if we see it clearly. Both the perceiver and the perceived, the subjects and objects, are effervescent, burbling, slipping this way and sliding that way from one moment to the other.
So when we leap into the canoe and begin to adjust our shifting awareness we are gradually startled to notice that we are strangely still even as the world itself is swiftly passing behind us in a rush, a blur. We become increasingly still and this stillness becomes like a fundamental force, like gravity. We surrender to this inevitable gravity and even as everything around us whirs past, dissolves, transforms -- and many things within us too, if we are honest -- something which we cannot grasp holds mysteriously still, unchanging.
Movement, motion, is always a matter of contrast, or comparison. If two birds are flying side-by-side at exactly 70 miles per hour, they appear to one another as two completely still perceivers in a world otherwise in motion.
When something (something ultimately not nameable) in us mysteriously, momentarily, graciously -- finally! -- comes to rest, becomes still, that stillness welcomes us with all it has ... and becomes a welcoming force. As if the whole of time were directed at this extraordinary occurrence in time. Then EVERYTHING has transformed. The entire world as we had known it both appears more vividly and disappears with equal -- though unnamable -- vividness. Our concepts and vocabularies fail. A vast Welcome! breathes into us from the stones and the sky, from the rivers and grasses, and it’s nothing we can photograph -- neither with a still shot or a movie camera. We cannot capture it, but while we visit we are utterly, inconceivably Home.
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