January 27, 2024
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
I’ve become acutely aware of my distaste for the constricts of time. The way our actions must sometimes match up with the hands on the clock. I’m now tied to giving Brownie food and insulin twice a day, as close to 12 hours apart as possible.
I briefly escaped this warped clockwork prison by ignoring the clock yesterday morning. All right, we’re in the kitchen, but he’s not eating. I will sit with him till he eats, then give insulin. He’ll eat when he’s able to.
It wasn’t deliberate, this mental shrug. I think it was a little spark of soul that somehow shot through the density of worry and dreariness, and from that moment to accomplishing the insulin shot, I neglected to look at the clock.
Afterward, I was surprised to note that the dose had happened within the parameters of acceptable timing. Over the last month-plus, when doling out food and insulin, I’ve been compelled to constantly watch the clock as if I can lasso temporality, reel in the lariat, and tame time to my needs. Even though I know that’s impossible.
*****
I wonder if actual prisoners develop a sanity safety mechanism of ignoring time? Whatever the reason for incarceration, surely the cruelest punishment is that prisoners must feel they’re not riding the express train straight to freedom, but the pokey choo-choo that makes a whistlestop at every cow town and country crossing.
Brownie’s shocking diagnosis of diabetes happened so quickly there was, ironically, no time to anticipate what it meant. It gradually trickled into awareness that a certain freedom I had taken for granted was gone. You only got three hours of sleep last night? Well why don’t you just sleep in a bit…oh, wait, can’t do that. Food and insulin must happen more or less at the crack of dawn.
*****
Believing in an apparently nonexistent construct called time has always imprisoned me to some extent. Perhaps it imprisons all of us, in our individual ways.
Slipping past the newest bar on my personal time cage yesterday offered me, not freedom from the onus of a time-dependent task, but from my perception of self as slave to that time-master. It was a novel experience of timelessness, captured within an etheric hourglass.
How and when might our time prison be dissolved? The Solar Flash, Ascension, the Event…It won’t be the magnificent experience I anticipate if I still must keep one eye on the clock. Some say our animals are much closer to the experience than we can be. If so, any worry about future clock-watching and giving insulin shots is needless. Brownie will be there ahead of me, waiting.
Meanwhile, I talk myself through sticking a needle in my beloved cat with the whispered incantation, gently, gently, gently. Most of the time the fairies and devas I ask to over-watch the process guide my touch through the cat’s silky fur, so he seems hardly to notice the needle.
I’m glad the devas and fairies haven’t abandoned us in order to frolic in the land of no time, but are willing to bind themselves to a clock long enough to help a stumbling human who calls on their magic. Twice a day, every day.