Still water, and a swan reflecting. The man stands, eyes shaded, scanning the horizon. Reed stems bend against the wind, with the weight of unseen birds, bearded tits or warblers, or some other small, feathered thing. Feathered, like the reeds themselves at this time of year, silver fronds catching sunlight, and smiling.
And I wonder…
What is it we do when we step outside, outside of ourselves, of our lives, of time?
How is it that we step into a moment? What is a moment? When does it start and how does it end? A moment of still water and swan – did that start when the whiteness of serenity caught my senses, or did it start with all the other swans I have seen, those that flew low over head, their downdraft touching my scalp and the deep thwoop of their wingbeats echoing a heartbeat, those that whip-cracked the ice on the frozen lake as they skidded in landing, and seemed to enjoy it so much they took flight again for another circuit, those who geese-hissed me away from their nest with wings raised?
Did that moment on the marsh end when I walked on, dropping back into the conversation about the nature of grief, or does it continue now as I remember it? Will it spool onwards like a film running in the background to come back into focus when I see the next Mute or Hooper or Bewick?
When we stop to look, not just with our eyes, but with the whole of who we are, not just our senses but also our soul and our memory and our reality and our dreams, when we stop like that does time stop too? Or does it expand? Do we step into a moment, or does it seep into us, the still moment, the deep silent moment, does it become a part of who we are so that the next time we pause to truly look, we are also looking from the perspective of that other moment, of all the other moments that we have allowed to seep in?
Out on the reserve, I feel like a heretic because I am no bird-watcher. I can only name the commonest of our residents and winter migrants and don’t know who lives here and who is only passing through. My own delight is in the water, those fallen patches of sky among the green, and the feathers that sway a-top the reeds, silvered gold in the gentle autumn breeze. My joy is in noticing that the speed of light is slower than science would have us believe, that there aretimes when it too stands still, when pools of sunlight are caught and held like miscreant minutes and stolen seconds.
My curiosity is about the land and the water. I wonder how it feels about time. Does it remember the time before it was shaped and designed and designated beautiful enough to be protected? Does it fear the future when the berm will be breached and all our work will be swept away? For the land, our lifetimes are merely the minutes and seconds, when we are gone, so it will be changed. Not for the better or for the worse, just for the different. Therein lies another heresy. That the land will change and we cannot stop that being so. That many species will pass out of being in the world. For all our work, this will happen.
I do not say that we should not protect such things, such places, such life. I join with those trying to do so – but I know that ultimately we will fail – because ultimately we will be one of the species no longer in theworld. And the world will be different.
There are those who say it will no longer be beautiful when we no longer look upon it, but I know that is not so. I know that we are not the onlyspecies to appreciate beauty or joy or a warm bed or a good feast. Despite what we may have been told, we are not the only species to laugh and to play, nor the only one to love and to grieve. And who knows, whoever orwhatever survives us or comes after, will seek in their own way to preserve what they consider to be beautiful. Perhaps, since we cannot read their languages, they are already among us and already doing so.
And perhaps they are very small things indeed, engineered or birthed by our mother planet to speed the passing of the things that do most harm.
We do step outside of time, when we step outside. It isn’t that timestops when we do, it is that we truly want it to do so. We want the moment, that still perfect momentto expand into infinity and us with it and all the beauty that is to remain, exactly as it is in that precious second when we fully connect with it.
But there is another breath, another heartbeat, and time gently taps us the shoulder and says walk with me. And we are tempted away, so easily, swept back into the river and onwards through the mutability. The sad thing is not that this happens, but that we so often fail to understand the necessity of it happening – that what we call beautiful and precious is so precisely because of the transience of its being.
We might do better then, to step back into time, to step back in time, to take a step back and look at our relationship with time. Time is just another word for change, for mutation, for shifts, for transience.
Rather than trying to hold on to a moment, we would nourish ourselves more by gathering moments briefly and letting them fly free on the wind. We would care more for the planet by working with its changes, seasons, ages and aeons. We would cater better for our fellow earthlings if we took the time to understand their needs and ensure that we lived in ways that allowed for them, not just on the reservation, not on the marginal land, that we choose to spare and call special, but integral on all the land to adapt our patterns to theirs and to the changeling nature of the planet itself.
