Wing Tips and Soil Luminescing the Sun

Meeting the Timeless Within Time and Time Within the Timeless in Art and Life

I find myself interested in work that has an expression of the timelessness within time. Art or dance that shows the movement within stillness, the stillness within movement; the ever-present always already immutable permanence within the ever-changing impermanence - or the ever-changing impermanence within the immutable Brahman. In someways that are not obvious to the linear, measuring, comparative minds that so permeate our cultural conditioning, it is a reality always and already here. When it is unveiled to our awareness we can recognize it everywhere. It is the nottwo of the timeless and time.

I find that art, or maybe what is to me great art, is a resolution of (apparent) paradox in form. It is seeded from the transrational and unveils at least a breath of the aperspectival.

Perhaps it is the awareness of timelessness that allows us to illuminate the unconditioned truths that live within the appearances of time.

My own life, work and writing are informed by a lack of division between time and eternity, the transcendent and the immanent. My experience is that time and this body connected to all other bodies and life is a medium for eternity to realize itself. Process is its dance of delight. When identity is fluid and grounded in the groundless, in the unknown, in eternity or the timeless, we, as time, as birth and death, as process, life, and human and more than human, can be ever more present and open to what is emergent in connection with life. We can be more open to the imaginal, the intuitive and non-linear. We can meet life ever more fully. This conscious dance can inform a different way of perceiving and therefore result in different movements and outcomes. Contrasting that, time and its productions that do not allow themselves to see outside of their linearity, express themselves differently.

Meeting time-centered culturally conditioned life with eternity, which is present to time-centered self-conception, and also what is its essence beyond the limitations of that self conception, can speak to and call forward what is beyond that. I have termed it as “receiving life’s darshan” - receiving and speaking to life’s and your divine essence. “Living in namaste”.

All of that being said I still can discern these distinctions, and make appointments and aspire to be there when I agree to be there.

Yet, in a larger and growing sense, what was the beat and rhythm of clock time might become the rhythm of a heartbeat, the rhythm of one’s breath, the calls to soul coming through Silence, the rhythm of the clouds, the rhythm of nervous and digestive systems, the rhythm of the waves, the rhythm of the sun, moon and stars, the rhythm perceived in the poetry of a system, the rhythm of our Play with the dynamic colors of rhythm themselves - or maybe an apparently arrhythmical flow of imaginal vision. Resting in an awareness that is beyond yet also present with and part of this holistic organicity, time takes on a different experience and its expression a different substance.

Ellen Davis © May, 2024

(excerpted from a comment to Jeremy Johnson)

All images taken with an iPhone 12 Pro by Ellen Davis, © June, 2024