Suspended

the road winds ahead
below an insipid sky
gulls ghost on the wind
we are suspended in time
waiting for the green of spring

Kim M. Russell, 2017

My response to Carpe Diem #1124 time

Today Chèvrefeuille is challenging us (again) with the prompt ‘time’, which we have seen several times before, but we are looking at how to experience or not experience time. He has shared a poem by Khalil Gibran, from which the following lines gave me inspiration:

 ‘But if in you thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,
And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.’

He also asked us to think about what time is and whether we need it. In The Pilgrimage, before the start of the ‘Speed Exercise’, Petrus says:

[…] ‘It’s going to be worse that way,’ he said, ‘because time isn’t something that always proceeds at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly time passes.” […] (source: The Pilgrimage by Paulo Coelho)

In the Speed Exercise, the goal is to really experience time by walking half as fast as you do normally. It’s sometimes called ‘Saint Phitus-step’: taking two steps forward and one back, which slows your walking speed and makes you aware of time. At the start, you concentrate on how to do it, but in a short time you don’t have to think about it as it becomes an automatic way of walking.