Time

Time's a funny thing. Sometimes in a dream a few minutes feels like miles - seconds stretch into leaps and vast strides. When you really pushing it, the last two minutes of reps in your gym routine feel like vomit and forever. Time's a funny thing. And perhaps God laughs at us because we are so bound by it. We take it so seriously! And yet night after night, our dreams play with us - inviting us into just a hint of that timeless Time. Perhaps God's also saddened by us because we idolize and worship time. Perhaps we even deaden our selves and souls by making too rigid a discipline of it.

On a retreat you are invited to rest in a Time that falls outside of time.The always eternally present now. Available to us anywhere and everywhere. The nunc stans - the now that stands eternally before us, around us, within us - above us and below us. This can be scary because we love to schedule and organize and time-frame and be committed to clear purposes and goals. And there's nothing wrong with that! But we over-obsess by turning that one thing into everything. Our goals become our God or Gods. Surely our lives can't just be so purpose-driven?

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May you find time to sit under the Bodhi Tree at the centre of your heart - sit at the feet of your Inner Teacher, listening to the soulful silence - singing, saying or sipping tea between you and You. May you rest and be restored in that Time which falls outside of time... From there, may you have the heart to re-engage and to fill the frames of your time again. But this time with a greater and gentler ease - a humour and humility - a fuss-free fluidity.

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I think to be human is to be this and that - frame and frameless, centre and circumference, the see-er and that which is seen, the hearer and that which is heard, the adorer and that which is adored. To be human is to be in and out, eastern and western, northern and southern, the key and the door, the dead and the risen. Far too often we think we must choose between the two - but both, both are our birthright.