Super X

With a camera, we may keep everything that we find. Everything that we see becomes ours. The camera is the ultimate collector. We need not take physical possession of a thing in order to possess it. To keep its image is enough. Once it is captured it becomes part of us. We assimilate all that we see. The layers build up over time. Each image, coded on some neuron or collection of neurons. Collections of collections. Ours brains are swelling. Maybe taking photographs is a natural extension of what we're already programmed to do. Scan, search, isolate, focus, analyze, reflect. We take pictures all the time. We frame and pan and crop. All the time. Everything of value is noted, and sorted and stored. We're already a camera and light table. We have the eye and the mind. A photograph however is a special moment of synchronicity. It is a frozen interaction with the world. Each and every photograph has one thing in common. They all stop time. They capture it. A photograph is thunder in a bottle. It is the sound of an oncoming storm. Or, it is the echo of the thunder. A photograph is an echo. Do you see that heavily oxidized brass shell-casing above? That thing's been sitting in this little crevice of a rock for years. But that orange lichen has been there far longer. The two of them together make for a lovely pair of old crusted things. Of course the casing is artifact, the lichen, geofact. One was made by man, the other by nature, by God. The shell-casing is from some old starter's  pistol. We can see the sharp cut of the hammer strike at the bottom of the X. Perhaps some race began here long ago. Lank bodies crouching in the mist of Ring Mountain. The race is over, and the boy who won it has grown old and passed on and somewhere in an attic is a loving cup with his name engraved upon it, also of brass, also lying on its side and cast off long after its purpose was served. And most of the time this would be a very sad thing because nobody would ever remember that race or the boy who won it. Except there was a photograph and a mind to interpret it and that mind is yours. 

∞

The Time Machine

His eyes shine in the darkness like the glory of a wise man in the midst of a foolish crowd.  He illuminates the dark soul of the unbeliever. He hides for shame among the shadows, he has been exiled from the sky. He is called the Ghost Owl, for he is likened to the spirit world. He is called the cat with wings. But what does he mean to me? 

We shared a beach together, or rather, we shared a dune. First he flew above me, leading me to an open depression where I found him quietly preening. He suffered my proximity for an hour, turning his knowing gaze to me from time to time and occasionally opening his mouth. We sat together like this, with me quietly talking to him while he tended to the feathers on his legs. He was telling me something. He had a message to give. I could feel the presence of something far greater than myself, something ageless, timeless, immortal. And it occurred to me, sitting out here at Pt. Reyes, alone and in the wild, that I was in fact no longer a participant in the delusion of time. 

In nature and among the wilder things that grow, and go about in the world, there is no time. There are of course no clocks and there are no calendars and there is no context for what might be called a life. A lifespan. The life of the owl is now, in this moment, the exact same life of all the owls that came before it. It does nothing differently than it's grandfather one thousand times removed. It sits here in ageless grass upon ageless powdered stone following ageless instincts. It exists outside of time. It *is* a time machine. In this moment, removed from the world as I know it, away from those things I trust as sure and true, away from my iPhone and my car, *I* am also outside of time; for as long as I choose to be.

What the owl told me is that the world runs on its own. It follows its own rhythms and its own rules. It always has and it always will. It has been said that we are but temporary stewards of this planet, but that is giving us far too much credit and is far too kind a name for what we are to it. I learned, from the owl, that in the best case scenario all I know is the partial truth. About life, about nature, about *anything*. Being here, beside this owl was, perhaps, the first time I was truly living. I was living a life for the sake of living. It was an hour that wasn't an hour for there was no longer such a thing as an hour. 

Nature is a time machine that exists outside the framework of time. Yet it is like a clock itself, in that it runs continuously in linear rhythms. It flows. It tends to favor the circular. It tracks the age of things with visible symbols - cracks, lines, the fading of color, the brown and withered, the celebration of decay. We can see the visible proof of mortality in nature yet is nature truly mortal? Time is only relevant to the mortal. It is only the fear of death that necessitates the tracking of time at all. For the immortal there is no time worth measuring. There are only seasons. 

The owl, the night bird, has made itself visible in the light. He has made himself known. He demands my attention. Like the Holy Spirit whose light illuminates the soul of the unbeliever, the owl reminds me to believe and bids me to remember: there is no time when there is everlasting life. 

o O o