Time can be so fluid. A day can stretch out to feel like a week; hours flash past like an unplanned nap vanishing your afternoon. Time drapes loosely over the frame of the day when it’s allowed, not hemmed in by structures or plans. It doesn’t happen enough: holidays or weekends; when you’re absorbed in the flow of what you’re doing.
You don’t need months or weeks or even hours to warp time. You just need to pay attention and get all zen with life. Nature helps. It always does.
In our seven weeks sailing in the Caribbean, we had nothing to do but sail and swim and play and live. It was a great big luxurious stretch of time, and I was nervous we’d get bored. We didn’t, we got flowy.
Our days started early, with the sun. On the first morning an alien, upside-down version of Max woke us, eyes buggy behind his mask, head poking through the top hatch into our cabin. ‘Can we go snorkelling yet?’ he asked. It wasn’t properly light yet – too early to be up – but minutes later we were in the water, in a pattern that became normal. As did going to bed with the sun after days unspooling in a long ribbon of time stretching on and on, shrinking to a blur in hindsight.
It wasn’t just time but space that was fluid, and not just because we were floating. Beds moved: I’d come on deck and there was Max, asleep on the cockpit cushions, or Hatty and Max would disappear into hammocks, safe cocoons hanging in the dark. One evening, in the golden light of nostalgic memories and approaching sunsets, we collected mattresses, pillows, hammocks for a family sleep-out on the catamaran’s trampoline.
There was a strong breeze – there usually was, great for sailing and keeping both mozzies and heat at bay. The sky changed colour slowly, gradually, and then all at once, the warmth dialling up from peachy soft to oranges and reds with the brightness of battle and danger. The sun sank below the water and pulled the plug on colour, quickly draining away. Flying fish skimmed the water, little flashes of silver in the lingering light.
Everyone had been briefed on what to do if they decided to go inside, or if it started to rain – chuck mattresses and pillows and torches through hatches, climb back into bed. But after some tussling for sheets and position, everyone fell asleep.
Except me. I couldn’t, not there. There was too much going on – too much wind flapping, light dappling, jingling of ropes. So I lay there contently and took it all in, the water and the wind and the stars.
I knew where I was, and that I was profoundly part of the world. I’d spent weeks feeling the wind and waves, both directly and through their effect on our home. They’d pushed us between islands, and I’d sensed their joy and their power. The moon was there, one side squashed where it was working towards full. I knew without even looking: in the absence of hard divisions into schedules and weeks, its shape marked time.
I find so much joy and awe and wonder in this kind of belonging, in knowing that I’m part of something so much bigger. That I’m insignificant, and everything I do doesn’t matter because the bigger things – the things that really count – are outside of my hands. It doesn’t feel scary and unsafe, instead it is deeply freeing: it means I can stop trying to control the world. Everything is as it is meant to be.
As well as the world, I was connected to my family. I could hear them breathing, see their crumpled shapes of sleep dotting the deck. I knew what they were loving, what they were anticipating; what was lighting them up and bringing them down. It wasn’t all good – I also intimately knew the arguments that were simmering, the patterns of annoyances and grievances. We’d spent so much time together that I was craving other people to talk to, who didn’t see me as the finder of swimmers, the adjudicator of arguments and the organiser of all things but someone with a life and interests beyond this family and this time. But everything was very simple. I had roots and a solid base, even when floating in a sea of Caribbean blue.
Back in the real world, it’s hard to hold on to that perspective, that trust in the rightness of things, of being part of something way bigger, more beautiful and profound than ourselves.
It dulls and warps, and out leak opportunities for fun, freedom and joy. There’s less feeling and doing – bed times are set, as are beds – and more obligations.
Some of this is the return to the real world of school and work, but a lot of it isn’t. It’s about attention, and how mine has shifted from experiencing and relishing the world and others, to getting things done and holding on tight to things, to control.
I try to find the awe and beauty: the tang of lemon-scented gums outside the house, the glow of sun reflecting off the dam as I run. Each morning I admire the bright bursts of crepe myrtle flowers out the window, joyful pink in a layered backdrop of garden greens. As summer cools there is less of them and I’m glad, sick of sweeping up faded flowers and possum poo. As I sweep, the rhythmic scratching of straw on concrete, I realise that the flowers are like the moon, counting the weeks into autumn. Once they’re gone – soon – I won’t see them until next spring. The bucket of worn colour is shrivelled time, summer in petals.
It’s beautiful but I’m not paying attention.
I vow to go slow, stay aligned.
The question I set when I began writing this was this: why do we need to connect to the world, to nature? Because this connection lets you see properly, with context: the magic around you, the vast and astounding web of interconnected things that make up the planet, its systems and our lives. We don’t need to understand it – we can’t. We just need to feel what a tiny and miraculous thing our own life is, and the joy, freedom and possibility of that.
It lets you into the secrets of cycles and patience and trust in things unfolding at the right speed and time. And it gives you the foundation to think about what matters, and what you’re going to do with your one wild and precious life, no matter whether they’re big things or small.
If you can see old flowers as shrivelled summer, watch the sun pull the plug on the colours in the sky, then every day will contain moments of beauty and meaning, and the opportunity to learn what’s important to you.
Works of Nature
Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) sounds more like a kid’s birthday dream/theme than a London-based experiential art collective whose work ‘reinterprets the idea of human perception and experience’. Their exhibition Works of Nature (on until 14 April at ACMI in Melbourne) is as incredible as it is hard to describe, using digital technology to explore the connections between and around us in cross-disciplinary collaborations between scientists, artists, poets, indigenous leaders, musicians and actors.
In one room scientific scans of a massive Colombian kapok tree become a five metre high projection showing the flow of nutrients and air from roots to crown as rivers of colourful, pulsing transformational light that make the invisible visible. In another space it’s the human body that’s the artwork, with the passage of oxygen through the lungs and heart echoing the tree’s networks of roots and branches that bridge the gap between the ground and sky. There are accompanying poems, a room of beanbags in which to listen to a guided meditation by Cate Blanchett, and it’s so much more than this sounds: the immersive nature of the experience, the scale, the soundscape, add up to a feeling of deep, almost religious awe.
In this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, MLF’s co-founder Barney Steel says:
‘You might come in with a certain idea of what a tree is, or what a tree is in relationship to you, but the artwork will let you experience how your out-breath flows into a tree, and then how the tree’s out-breath flows into your body,’ Steel says. ‘Simply put, in order for you to exist and breathe in the first place, you’re woven into a relationship with the plant kingdom.’
Go see it if you can, and take the kids – it’ll blow their minds.
Forget yourself
Connection to the world is where it begins, but where it goes is up to you. I love this quote from American novelist Henry Miller:
Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music – the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.