Month: October 2021

Bee-ing in the Moment

The purple asters in the yard of my apartment building are as tall as I am and full of pollinators. I invited a neighbor to admire the pollen party. The guests were four kinds of bees—big furry bumblebees, honeybees, tiny bright green bees, and one enormous black bee with iridescent wings—and three kinds of butterflies. Though I’ve seen other species, this day’s visitors were a Western Pygmy Blue (the world’s smallest), a green butterfly with yellow spots on its wings, and a black one with white trim. In a ceaseless and seemingly random dance of wings and petals vibrating, they changed flowers and sought nectar again.

My neighbor and I became entranced, neither of ready to move on. He said, “They’re so busy, I feel a sense of accomplishment just watching them.”  I said I felt the opposite way, that I was doing nothing at all but watching bees.

My Days with No Clock

“To Customer Service, Now and Zen:

The clock I received for the order copied below does not work. I tried reinstalling the batteries. Removed them and tried it on the cord alone. I guess it’s truly a Zen clock, because, as in that classic cartoon of the two monks, “Nothing happens next.”

I have owned one of the older and truly perfect models for over ten years, the triangular wooden clock with the circular face, its hands moving over art, not numbers. I’m sorry that style has been discontinued. Last week, I knocked it over by accident, and the hour hand is loose, though the minute hand is still working.

The new design is dull and blocky in comparison, offering limited aesthetic value, just the chime. The energy of the digital face isn’t serene like the old circular face. Sad change, Zen clocks, sad change. The symbolic relationship with time as expressed by clock design is so different. A digital readout, a relentless march of numbers, is linear and measurement-oriented. Quantitative time. People in a state of nature experience time as circular. The round clock face with no numbers echoed the roundness of the earth, the curve of the horizon, the cycles of planets and the sun and moon, all round, all moving in circles. In mathematical perfection, yes, but with no numbers.

I mourn my old clock. Maybe the new one felt judged and refused to function for me. I know all things must pass and change, but I as they do, I would like to experience time as a circle and my clock as a work of art. If the old clock can’t be fixed. I may have to settle for a new one to replace the malfunctioning one I received, but I may hide it behind the old one and just let it ring for me, unseen.”

*****

After I sent this message to Now and Zen, I packed the digital clock for shipping and waited a few days for a return authorization. Meanwhile, in my clock-less bedroom, I slept well—unusually well—and woke thinking of Evan Pritchard’s book, No Word for Time, his account of studying with Mi’kmaq tribal elders to learn his ancestral culture. He tells of asking what the word for time was. The answer? There is no word for time. Apparently, that was also the case at Now and Zen. Nothing happened next. So, I unpacked the digital clock, put the batteries back in, and it worked. Today, I found someone who may be able to repair the old clock. I could end up living with both linear and circular time. And remembering the peace of sleeping and waking with no sense of time at all.