THE VOLUME OF TIME

OR
"You are what you don't shit."

We have little trouble imagining a three dimensional representation of space, here, there, and up there. So why did we stop at a one dimensional clothesline to represent time? If every point in space is that point for all time what represents its history through that time? Another point very close may have a slightly different history since events seem to be like weather casting fuzzy shadows and moving seasonal textures across the landscape of the space-time continuum. Such a volumetric view of time seems to always have known extremities between the most ancient past imaginable (big bang or god’s creation of everything six thousand years ago, whichever comes first) and the present and the relative direction you’re headed up to now. If we look at time like a volume within which events condense, navigate and precipitate, wouldn’t the dynamics of the past anticipate the momentum into the future clearly enough to dispense with leaders to misguide us. Just as unique perception of reality creates a unique reality tunnel, events common to all precipitate as many unique histories to effect the weather with the additional feedback event of our existence wherever we travel whenever we get there. With such an exponential increase in the complexity of cause and effect of changes in space and time what good is going beyond the one way clothesline of time other than the fun I find in thinking of time as weather?

How about going beyond time and space by doing without the existence of maps for either in the realities of personal time space experience. I exist only now, there is no other time for existence. Every thing I have ever experienced in my existence informs every thought and action I entertain and exercise in the present. I exist only here, there is no other where for existence. Everywhere I have ever been in my existence informs every place and direction I go and dance here, now. There is no time, it is all now. There is no space, it is all here. The big bang and the creation myth are demanded by those who want a good story, with a beginning, a middle and an end — the chaotic continuum of life in the universe blends such abrupt change into oblivion, the full moon does not tick. The concept of other wheres than here and other times than now arises from not seeing that even at the extremes of the the largest and smallest, the most ancient or farthest into the future to which we may imagine traveling, those extremes will remain just as remote when we get to the time and place we first intended.

Existence is a gloriously entertaining chaotic continuum being made digitally dull with the appearance of time by a flurry of schedules and records, with light pollution by fear of the dark and need to be noticed, with sound pollution by mechanical prosthetics and death dealers, with emotional pollution by senseless atrocities and cold blooded indifference to suffering and with environmental pollution by not needing heeding our greedy breeding and seeding by weeding out all but the deeding of every inch of America, the no longer so beautiful.

At this time of the year and in February I completely turn my gardens and mix in a volume of compost equal to the turned soil, bringing the bed up level with the boards that contain them. Each new season begins with soil as loose as in a pot that is half organic food. At harvest I eat what nature has made of some of that compost and next season’s compost is made of the remainders of the plants I harvested which, themselves, ate the remainder of the compost of which they are composed. At the end of each season the combination of watering making the soil more compact and the plants using the organic material to build their bodies the soil level drops as much as four inches.

At most any time of the year I can eat something out of my garden, although I am quite far from my ideal of eating only out of my garden. So far okra, sorrano peppers, spinach, lettuce and arugula are the only plants that exceed my consumption of them. For short bursts I get too many tomatoes, but Tejas summers are seemingly a no grow period, no matter the rain pattern. What I don’t eat of what I bring into the kitchen goes back to the compost from whence it came and what my body doesn’t use of what I do eat goes into a composting toilet.

Entities are accumulations of matter and meaning retained from their experience of an existence of passing through the space time continuum — or of having the space time continuum pass through them. Orbits complete, cycles repeat, pendulums return to their seat. Choose any beginning. It’s right next to its end. My mother believed plane crashes happen in threes so firmly that she saw no flaw in counting a fourth as a new number one.