Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

   

Night Sea, 1963, Agnes Martin
oil, gold, canvas

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In my best moments I think "Life has passed me by” and I am content.

—Agnes Martin

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Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. 

It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. 

And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. 

This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.


—Joseph Campbell
Myths of Light

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For the birds there is not a time that they tell,
but the point vierge between darkness and light,
between being and non-being.

You can tell yourself the time by their waking,
if you are experienced. 

But that is your folly, not theirs.


—Thomas Merton 
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

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Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. —Taisen Deshimaru

  

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My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind. In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting. Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. 

Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. 

The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.


―Ovid
Metamorphoses, 8 CE

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By the time you are
by the time you come to be
by the time you read this
by the time you are written
by the time you forget
by the time you are water through fingers
by the time you are taken for granted
by the time it hurts 
by the time it goes on hurting
by the time there are no words for you
by the time you remember
but without names
by the time you are in the papers
and on the telephone
passing unnoticed there too

who is it 
to whom you come  
before whose very eyes 
you are disappearing 
without making yourself known


—W. S. Merwin
to the present tense

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