BETWEEN FRAMES

December 16th, 2019

If we pay attention to the moment, we can taste death.  That oddly taboo subject that destabilizes lives and sends us sprawling into inscrutable grief.  Inscrutable in that something or someone can seem so close and yet the most distant unseen star at the farthest edge of the universe is still closer to us in the moment then someone who is frozen in memory.

But we need not focus on this extreme experience, nor is it even necessary to understand the torture of this paradox.

We need only try to pin down the very moment -right now- as we experience it, to understand loss.  Whether you are reading these words or listening to them, the very moment you have spent with them is dying off, molting into an irretrievable form that you have somehow been pushed beyond.  Loss, is always with us.  We are constantly experiencing it by virtue of the fact that the moment is arising in the first place. 

The petals of the future unfurl as the moment curls back to die.

Whether we take the time to notice it, relish it, or let it pass while absorbed with some inane triviality, the moment in which we exist seems stable, maybe even solid, but this is an illusion in the same way a spinning propeller can look like a disk. 

The moment we experience is changing so rapidly, evolving into the next with such an unrelenting pace, with no discernible difference between now and the next that we mistake the consistency of change for a consistency of being.

The repetitive music of our own thoughts, behaviors and routines again makes it seem as though we are the same person persisting through time.  But we are constantly changing with the moment, though both are subtle enough in this never ending switch that we can’t quite land the arrow between the film frames.  The movie cannot be slowed, nor paused.

But with practice we can step back and take it all in, and genuinely make this communion by paying a little attention.