In Search of an Unscheduled Day

There is a painting by Salvadore Dali called “The Persistence of Memory.” The melting clock faces suggests that the theme is really about time and I guess that is what brought the Dali painting to mind this morning. There is an 8 1/2 by 11 paper calendar on our refrigerator door, held down by magnets. Penciled in by a nurse at the Cancer Infusion Center are the scheduled appointments for the month. Blood tests are taken once a week. Zometa (to strengthen the bones) is given once a month. Chemotherapy treatment is every three weeks, as is a brief consultation with the oncologist. The three weeks that fall between chemo treatments usually give me one bad week and two good weeks. So we try to schedule visits from friends and family during those two good weeks and around other scheduled appointments. The paper calendar quickly becomes a maze of dates, times, names and notations. That is what my life has become, what OUR lives have become, because Bob’s life has changed as much as mine.

At our cabin in northern British Columbia we rarely looked at a calendar… it hardly mattered what day of the week it was. The rising and setting of the sun was our clock, the seasonal changes and the comings and goings of plants and animals was our calendar… the first snow, the tree swallow’s annual arrival, spawning salmon in Kitwanga River, crisp days and birch leaves that turned to gold. Life was uncomplicated… down to the basics of food, water, shelter, and friends.

In our sailboat years there was a special place on Middle Rendezvous Island where I would go to be by myself for three or four days to meditate and write. I would pitch my tent in the protection of a cedar grove and sit on the mossy cliffs that overlooked the waters of Calm Channel. I named this place of hermitage “Silent Ground.” Today I looked back at words I wrote in July of 1997.

The natural world is quiet. Why do humans have to be so noisy? I am at home in this silence. And I am becoming attuned to the sense of timelessness that I find here. One moment flows into the next like the tide coming and going. A natural flow of time rather than that which is dictated by appointment books, or arranged into neat little segments, like the short and long ticks around a clock face, or digital numbers on the microwave oven, as if each second of every day needs to be recognized and recorded.

Then time seemed endless. Now my time is measured in months, and is nibbled away by the squares on a paper schedule hanging on the refrigerator door. Like Dali’s painting, time is melting away and I look in vain for the square that says “Morningstar.”

... PLM