Enough Time
Here in the west we’ve a strange notion of time. We think it moves predictably, faithfully and inexorably from the past, that it pours through this little funnel we call the present, and floods or trickles (depending on how your day is going) into the future. From the used to be, through the is, to the not yet. From the gone, through the given, to the got to be.
And if that’s not strange enough for you, we are also fairly assured (depending again on how your day is going) that this is working for us. There are no street demonstrations demanding an end to linear time, for example.
When in the throes of post-diagnosis misery, I was in my basement room, off in another country, in a kind of generic air b/b place, a place clearly owned by someone with eastern spirituality affinities. Though it – or the allegation of it – was all around me, no peace of mind could I find. In a desperate moment I took down off the shelf one of those ‘365 photos/quotes to get you on your way’ books, a stout wad of a thing. I just I Chinged it, randomly cracking it open. This is what the entry I arrived at said:
The problem is that we think there’s enough time.
And I recognized immediately: that shit is true. It’s truer than true. It’s true in a way you wish it weren’t.
It’s been three years since Nights of Grief and Mystery was touring the countryside, making trouble, seeding the clouds with the possibilities of rough Gods and dark roads, three calamitous, tumultuous, storm clouded years for me. I foreclosed on the Orphan Wisdom School, I foreclosed on all the Griefwalking and Die Wiseing. And the prospect of being on a stage in a theatre with a band, and me tremouring involuntarily, left me quaking and cold.
But time hasn’t after all taken away that longing after a kind of companionship that seems only available when you make art of your sorrows and shambles. And I’ve no doubt that everything’s moving on. And I don’t want to wonder in years to come, if I’m granted them, whether I got it straight when crunch time came round, whether I lived as if it were so.
So, the Nights of Grief and Mystery – the beautiful full-band dream of it all – are on.
Caldera – the tour and the record – is on.
Trembling, Still – the book – is on.
And they will stand as something I did when I got the news, the news that brings that awesome clarity that for us civilians it just doesn’t go on and on, and on.
See you soon.
— Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
Founder of Orphan Wisdom
Learn more about Caldera here.
