Solvitur Ambulando

We leave Baltimore just before dawn, wheels up as the sky lightens from black to indigo. Now we are over the Rockies, white peaks topping the brown, crinkled slopes that shift in and out of the flotsam of cirrus clouds floating between the airplane and the ground. We are racing the sun westward. It is gaining on us, traveling at over 450,000 miles per hour, turning clouds and snow into a shifting ocean of white and gold.

From up here, the mountains are indistinguishable from one another, nothing more than creases in the earth's fabric, like wrinkles in the striped dress shirt that so stubbornly resists my best attempts to iron it. On the ground, though, the topography commands attention. Each hill has a set of distinguishing characteristics, a pattern, a face. Some may be now, or may have been regarded by people in the past, with religious reverence. Some might be imbued with personal meaning: that's where I went camping for the first time; she lives on the other side of the mountain; when I see that peak from the highway, I'm halfway home. Age and duration and immensity, encountering the fleeting, the subjective, the individual.

I'm reminded of Gary Snyder's 'The Mountain Spirit,' in which the poet contrasts human time with geologic time.

And the Mountain Spirit always wandering
hillsides fade like walls of cloud
pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea

old woman mountain hears
shifting sand
tell the wind
"nothingness is shapeliness"

Mountains will be Buddhas then
when-bristlecone needles are green!
Scarlet penstemon
flowers are red!

Mystics and theoretical physicists contend that there is no time, that the division we perceive between one moment and the next is illusory. To the Ultimate, each moment - even each possible moment - is sempiternal. I am sitting on the runway in Baltimore: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I am 30,000 feet above the Rocky Mountains: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I am eating tacos with Linda in the Mission tonight: so it was, is, and ever shall be. I overslept and missed my plane. Linda can't meet me because she has to work late. We decide to get pho instead of Mexican food. The plane crashes. I survive the wreck. I die on impact. So it was, is, and ever shall be. All moments are one moment. There is only the flow.

So goes the theory, at least. I've only had a direct experience of it a few times in my life, usually on a spiritual retreat. Once in rural Connecticut, when Adam sounded the gong to end the zazen session, and the reverberations rang through everything, through me, became me, lasted forever, had always been. Once walking the grass labyrinth in Croton, when the night sky opened like a window and the starry void hung before me, closer than my eyelashes. Once at the Claggett Center near Frederick, when the whole world became nothing more than windblown sunlight moving amid the grass. Once at 3:00 a.m. in the chapel at Holy Cross, as monks broke the Great Silence with the versicle of a psalm.

Otherwise I remain trapped in time, and usually not in the present. Like most people I know, I take vacations in the past and try to catch sneak previews of the future. Right now, this moment, slips away. Now. Now. Now. My left ankle hurts because of an injury I sustained 25 years ago. When I get that raise, I'm going to buy a better pair of dress shoes, which support my ankle better. Right now I'm thinking about the raise I might get.

To my conscious mind, I am moving forward along a straight line from left to right. Its beginning is 37 years, seven months, and twentysome days ago. Its end is occluded to me. The red plastic fire truck my father bought for me when I had the measles. The acrid smell of my father's breath as he railed drunkenly at me. The sound my father's ashes made as they poured out of the black plastic bag onto the forest floor. All are coordinate points that can be plotted along that single horizontal axis.

But perhaps our experience of time is more like walking a labyrinth, like that one in the Hudson Valley I stepped into so many years ago. The pattern is already there and we are in the midst of it. In order to remain in the tracks of the maze, we keep our eyes downcast, just a few inches beyond our toes. But the design is whole. There is no journey from point A to point B, because there is no point B: point A is all there was, is, and ever shall be.

If that's the case, though, then what is it that does all this chopping up of existence into time? What is it that gets excited about spending a weekend with John and Kelly on the farm? What is it that exults at the prospect of seeing Jessica? What is it that dreads? What is it that grieves?

Less than two hours out of San Francisco now. The mountains flicker in between clouds, brown and white, brown and white, ringing out in peals of gold.