What are you doing, my love?

I walk the aisles of the store, and more joyfully, the familiar paths of the forest…I make the bed and sweep the floor and prepare soup for dinner: my homely little tasks serve only to remind me I am not doing them for you. The time passes happily and usefully enough, but when I am with you, oh, with you – then I am fully alive and engaged and the great mystery of the cosmos is ticking over. And I do not understand, save I want to step into the mystery and let its currents take me where they will. Bravery? Stupidity? Naiveté?

“What matter”, says my imaginary friend, rather crossly, “for it is every cliché of love ever written.” Perhaps so, my friend, perhaps so. Though having tested the waters; being willing to step into the stream and see where it takes one would seem to be a fine metaphor for many of life’s endeavours. I try not to speak of trite romanticism here, though, but more about purpose and meaning. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speaks of what he calls ‘flow’ – being fully present and immersed enough in an activity to lose sense of time, in an intensely pleasurable way. (Wikipedia has a fine piece on Csikszentmihalyi and his research linked here.) I am captured by the idea, although perhaps I see it in more mystical terms – after all, do not the fairy tales begin with ‘once upon a time’? Is not this sense of time outside of time a part of where mystery and magic reside? Do we step into this time, or step out of our own prosaic earth time?

That’s a question I best leave for now, but I do say this: that the rhythm of our lives can perhaps really only be satisfying when it has its moments of leaving behind human concepts of time and clock and calendar. When sun guides us through our days, and moon lights our evenings, and star fire bears witness to our love and longing. Take my hand, and we shall play in the great wheeling dance of the stars, my love…

I promise.