Time Travel

"Begrudge time and it will turn its back / on you like a dead secret. But bathe, kiss, enter, bow. Immerse / yourself in the time you have and time / will carry you softly and clearly…" — Mark Nepo, from his poem Rethinking Time

This post is coming to you a week later than intended because I have been riding a traveling wave of time. Launched from airports in Mexico City, Denver, and Orange County into a jam-packed visit with family and friends, the past and present have melded into a kaleidoscope of old memories and new encounters, while email and phones have become peripheral to sensory experience: Hugging my mother in her tiny, bright new apartment in the assisted living facility where she now lives. Driving through my old hometown in awe of how the trees have grown over the last twenty years. Celebrating birthdays, reunions, new beginnings, and first grandbabies. Feeling gratitude for the mysteriously paradoxical yet strong foundation of personal history that fuels my present life. This wave of travel will return me to the familiarity of home soon enough. Meanwhile, like the girl in the photograph above, I am luxuriating in the time I have, here and now. Photograph of sleeping girl on Lake Atitlán by Victoria Saratore