an ode to the rhythm of life

Everything has rhythm. The moon hs rhythm, the sun, the planets circling the sun all following their own cycle. The Universe is pulsing with endless and multidemensional polyrythms. 

And we too, a profound expression of all of this, also have our own rhythms. Our heart beat, sleeping and waking, the movement of walking, our daily routines - all are rhythm.

And yet somehow human beings have become so accustomed to the tick, tick, tick of time. The clock telling us when it's time to wake up, when it's time to eat, go to work, have lunch. It's time to pay our bills, pay our taxes, time to vote. We pay for time, get paid for time, have to put in leave in order to make use of the time that is granted to us by a higher power. There's time for tv, time for bed, time to retire. How much time do we have left until we die..

And yet underneath it all is the gentle, constant, rhythm. Our hearts beating, and our chest rising and falling with each breath, like the tides of the ocean dancing to the rhythm of the moon. 

Perhaps our survival, our response to this 'global crisis' is not so much about bail-outs, reducing carbon emissions, working harder, and all of the so-called solutions we come up with to fix a problem that we really don't fully understand.

Perhaps it's more about learning to listen again, learning to surf, learning to dance, learning to drum like our ancestors did - moving, breathing and making love to the rhythm of life.

Time and Rhythm

What is time? We wake up at a certain time in the morning, we get dressed, go to work and need to be there at a certain time. We're expected to put in a certain amount of hours to get paid our salary. We get given a certain amount of time to rest, to eat and for some of us time is directly proportional to money. I can't help thinking that we are slaves to this thing called time, this clock that we have created to keep the machine moving.

The problem with time is that it is uniform and it is one measure applied to all people. Nature doesn't have time. Nature has rhythm. There is a difference. Nature is full of rhythm, different rhythms that move in and out of one another. The moon revolves around the earth, the earth around the sun. The tide comes in and it goes out. It's predictable, but not slave to one beat, second after second, minute after minute.

As human beings we try to live outside of nature. We have our houses that protect us from the wind and rain. We have shoes on our feet that protect our feet from the earth. When we sit down we very rarely sit in the sand or on the grass. We nearly always put something between us and the earth.

But our rhythm betrays us. The rhythm we naturally experience reminds us that we are children of the earth. Our heart doesn't beat in time with the clock that we have created. Our breath has it's own rhythm - and responds to our needs, which also vary according to the rhythm of our body.

Sometimes we can be so caught up in the ticking of the clock and the mechanisation of our daily lives that we forget how to see and feel who we really are. We think that our day-to-day life by the clock is real, but it is just an illusion, something we created to help us, but by which we are now enslaved.

Perhaps part of letting go is letting go of time, and finding the rhythm of the earth once again. Dying to that which is already dead and opening our eyes to who we really are.