Meditatio I : Time as Raw Material

One of the biggest losses in modern-day culture is surely the loss of our sense of Time. Of the Past, in particular. Our deep, organic connection to the Past, to Time itself, is rarely mentioned or even acknowledged these days. Something is missing from our conversations. We are constantly told to ‘live in the moment’, ‘embrace the present’, ‘feel the oneness of the universe’ and all that. It is as if we lived suspended in an Eternal Present. It is as if Time itself were broken, irrelevant…
 
They say that ‘you can’t go home again.’ Yet our ‘Home’ is also the Past. Our ‘home’ is Time itself. It lives, it breathes within us. In the course of writing a first book some three or four years ago, I came across a great many texts about Zen and Buddhist philosophy and culture. That is when I chanced upon an idea, or perhaps what amounted to a spiritual image, of what art and culture could still mean to us, given the chance.
 
Time itself, I learned, is in fact the raw material of Zen art. But the idea was so far removed from what I had always known of our Western ways, so far removed from the ways we seek, in the West, to create meaning in our own lives, that it stopped me dead in my tracks. From there, it took a while for me to understand what that idea actually meant.
 
In this blog, I hope to invite a few “kindred spirits” to accompany me on the journey. I believe that as we are called upon to navigate a cultural, social and political landscape which feels increasingly shadowy, it becomes our life’s work to cast a glance back into the depths of Time in order to make sense of it. And of our own lives. I hope I meet you somewhere along the way.