Why are so many people so often in a rush and stressed these days, with way more to do than time allows? The sense of hurry varies, rural to urban, small to large, greater to lesser privilege; but we all know the feeling. It isn’t just right now, either; it has been going on for years. In the 1980’s, when computer use was first widespread, expectations about the speed of information flow dramatically increased. A lot of technology was changing a century ago, too: electric lights, cars, radios, telephones, and aviation. A half century before that, it was trains and telegraph. All of these changes were about increasingly rapid communication and transportation: moving people and information quickly. Even two centuries ago, the pony express was in a hurry….
A letter to the Editor not long ago remarked poignantly on this phenomenon:
“…I was struck by … the front-page report on the heartbreaking death of a baby in El Cerrito [left in backseat all day]… At what point did our lives become so pressured and busy that we began … forgetting our children’s presence? …”
(Letter by Anita Moran
S.F. Chronicle, June 12, 2009)
We’re too busy … to remember our children? It is as though time itself has speeded up! It is rushing past so quickly now, that we have no time … to eat? … to sleep? Is there time to breathe? Do we have time to think? Is there time to pause and enjoy beauty? 
I don’t like it. I like the technology, but I don’t like being rushed. And I’m doing something about it! I’m publishing this essay, which does two things: One, it gets at the deeper reasons why time has speeded up, it doesn’t just blame technology; and two, it offers a key to how to make it better, how to slow time down.
NO TIME….
There is no question but that the technologies of rapid communication and transportation have contributed mightily to the sometimes lethally exhausting pace of our current civilization.
Something deeper is also, and more fulsomely, behind the speed-up of time. The scientific revolution is the biggest, most influential single event in modern history. To find the deeper cause of rushing time, we need to look behind technology directly to its source: science. Other than through technology, how has the scientific revolution contributed to the incredible speed-up of time that we experience today?
Scientific Materialism
Scientific thought begins with the assumption that only measurable material events count when applying scientific method to reality. Undeniably, if you pare a problem down to its simplest elements, it can be dealt with more easily. The simplified reality addressed by modern science can be controlled to produce yummy results: useful gadgetry, machines for exploring space and to make war, and medical cures. East and West alike have eagerly embraced the many powerful results.
With scientific method limited solely to material reality, one might conclude that science has nothing to say one way or another about anything not material. However, many people, both in and out of science, have concluded that science and religion are irreconcilable. An argumentative standoff between science and religion would be one thing. But in fact, for centuries, among the better educated, science has been steadily gaining the edge.
Increasingly, the effect of the spreading scientific revolution, besides access to technologies, has been a tendency to banish everything in life except material considerations to a kind of Outer Mongolia of the mind. Human feeling and practice have been slower to come around; but gradually through generations the reshaping of conventional belief erodes the old ways. Finally, intangible human phenomena are chased away off into the shabby outskirts of what is accepted, or a little beyond, to a fringe area inhabited by weirdos, con artists, dupes, and a few foolish innocents. This extreme emptying of our discourse about human experience to rid it of anything other than what can be treated of by science is a root phenomenon of the modern western world. It is what most disturbs critics of the West.
Is there a connection between this materialist reduction of thought and speech, on the one hand, and the speeding up of time? We might claim that being unable to think and speak well about loving our child results in being unable to love her. But even if we grant that disturbing hypothesis – it does have some merit – it would go directly to forgetting the child in the backseat of the car; and it would not help explain why time is speeded up.
No, our interest is in why time is speeded up and how to slow it down. If our being tongue-tied about non-material realities is a clue, it has to be a clue about time. What does emptying our discourse of anything outside the purview of scientific materialism have to do with time?
Speaking Humanly
Humanly speaking, a crucial aspect of technology is that it is an external embodiment of us; it is like us, while extending our abilities even into what we wish or fantasize for them. Technology is designed to do something we could be doing ourselves, but do it better and more easily. A bicycle is faster and easier than walking. Our eyes can focus in on things at a distance, but the zoom lens of a camera does it better. A rocket ship to the moon extends the idea of transportation to realize an ancient dream.
Let’s try out the thought that time also is like technology in mirroring us. Time is an objectively embodied metaphor of human reality. The most basic fact about us is that existence is given to us and taken from us without – and regardless of – our choice or understanding. Time is an inexorable flow aging everything toward its death because it expresses the basic human reality of birth and death. It enacts this reality for us unmistakably, like a sculptural portrait. And time, as we conceive it and experience it, also manifests how we have come, collectively, to interpret human life. How we experience time directly expresses both the basics of birth and death, and our ideas about life and what is important in life.
Future Time and Past Time
So there is a distinctively modern time concept: Time is a continuous flow. It has no beginning and no end that we can conceive of, though it flows as if it had a beginning and were irremediably headed for an end. As is true of any continuous line, the flow of time is mathematically divisible, in principle, into an infinite succession of infinitesimally small points. These points correspond to the present in time, to “now.” We exist in time, always now. As we live each now, that now becomes past, no longer existing. We anticipate the approaching future, the now that is not yet. We live facing the future. Time washes over us passing behind us out of our field of vision. We pay scant attention to the past.
In striking contrast to our future-orientation is the seeming clenched-fist attachment of our violent Islamist critics to the past. They harbor smoldering resentments toward westerners for raping, pillaging, and burning their cities in the European Crusades 800 years ago. We westerners regret the desecrations but are frankly baffled to understand why anyone would care much about something that happened so long ago and to other people. We can barely remember last decade!
This is no minor difference. To the Islamists, those are not “other people,” nor did the excruciatingly horrific events occur so long ago as to be forgotten. Unwavering allegiance to one’s ancestors, keeping their memory alive in ritual and story, even seeking to redress wrongs done to them centuries earlier – such practices recognize the body of the tribal people as enduring, substantially untouched by death, forever present. It was not so long ago – in ancient Greece – that westerners too believed such things to be reality, while the changing fickle things of time seemed unreal. We western moderns, on the other hand, view all things, including life, as ephemeral. Everything passes, and the past is gone and forgotten. We have no long line of ancestors still present with us guiding us. We are alone. We create ourselves anew in every moment.
The modern concept of time suggests that, collectively, we in the modern western world believe in the finality of death. That is why our past is gone, so starkly at odds with the Islamist sense of the living past that is present now.
Belief in the finality of death: what convinced us of that? 
That belief follows automatically, logically, if one adheres to the scientific assumption that reality equals material reality. Clearly, if there is nothing to human life beyond its material components, then when those components cease operation, the human life has ended. Period. End of story.
Empty Time
Western materialism manifests in our future-oriented time concept, which expresses our materialist belief in the finality of death. Elsewhere on the planet, and at other times, concepts of time can be found strikingly at odds with ours. A central question remains to be answered: why do we have no time? Why do we feel the pressures of rushing time so acutely?
The answer is, our time speeds past because it is empty. At last we have the missing link! The emptying of our discourse so that it holds no references to realities transcending material reality results in belief in the ultimate destruction of everything by time. Nothing endures. Nothing inspires hope. Don’t give yourself to anything: it won’t last. The result is that our time is empty. Because we rarely can bring ourselves to believe in anything that is not a material reality, there is rarely anything to give us pause, to snag time, slow it down and make it hold still a moment. After all, how does one care about matter?
It does occasionally happen that time holds still. An aroma that suddenly takes us back to a remembered moment snags time: we pause, inhale, and are transported back to that other time momentarily. There are others, deeper pauses, so intensely touching our hearts as to take our breath away, make us tear up: a wedding, a wrenching death, a loved one saved from harm; a moment in a great cathedral with light streaming through stained glass, when the presence of God is palpable. But such moments are rare. Our time is all too empty of the things that count most: beauty, joy, expression of deep sorrow; and love, caring. Our complex networks of human interactions, production and distribution and so on, rush all of us along day by day absorbed in things rarely touching our hearts or souls; seldom giving us pause.
The modern time concept describes a fleeting time speeding past in an infinite succession of infinitely small point-moments, because the moments contain … nothing. The river of time is indifferent to what it washes over. This concept is the legacy of materialism. The fact that this concept has become embedded in our experience, and that we do in fact largely feel that swift passage of time, in rushed and stressed lives, goes much further.
The modern materialist concept of time has re-made our human experience of time. Acceptance of the scientific revolution has steadily grown, with concomitant gradual reduction of our discourse to topics of material reality. The trend has been reinforced constantly by science’s materialist sibling, capitalism, and bright offspring, technology. Their combined force pushes aside the dwindling human experience of time, which can slow and hold still awhile for something special.
As experiential time gets re-made in the image of the mathematico-material concept, a vicious cycle is set in motion whereby our experience in turn further reinforces the concept of empty time, thus encouraging the further emptying of experience. The emptiness of time thus gone mad also reinforces and is reinforced by the inhumanity of capitalism’s devolution into its global, corporate version, focused exclusively on profits regardless of individuals or communities adversely affected. We have interlocking systems gone awry, systems of thought and experience residing at the heart of who we are. It’s a juggernaut of deadly, lethal pressure on us all.
Empty Vessel
The objective embodiment of the emptiness of sustained materialism in the modern West is the fleeting, empty time of our increasingly stressed and harried lives at work, on the road, and often even at play. Modern time is the objective system whose mad rush expresses lives emptied of transcendence – of non-material values; such as close friendships, enduring love, beauty, art, and prayer. We began this essay wondering why we have no time. Now we know: Our lives are not empty because time rushes. Time rushes because our lives are empty.
What a shame! It’s all a misunderstanding. We should never have thought that science implied anything about the transcendent, or God, or love, or spiritual things; because it has and can have nothing whatever to say about any of them.
The experience of emptiness – feeling that our lives are empty – is distressing to us, even shattering, because we are vessels. The emptiness of modern time depletes our spirits. It falls abysmally short of our existential possibility; it offers us so little true human fulfillment. To clasp in our hands a bowl of water or soup and drink deeply from it can strike a chord within us, echoing our own frail human reality as it does. We create such artifacts as bowls, we fashion them lovingly of clay – from which we too are made – and give them place in our lives, because we need them to remind us of ourselves, of the vessels we are and are meant to be.
Being a vessel is about being open, able to contain, being filled, and holding. The time experience of the full vessel of human life surely must be starkly different from the pointless dash of modern public time.
FULL TIME
There are full times, moments stolen from or scattered sparsely among the empty, harried times of our public lives; magical times. They are not fleeting nows flashing past. Magical moments can occupy whole sections of the calendar. And they are not empty: they are known and named by their content: “That weekend in Paris,” “The picnic we had on the beach last Easter,” “The amazing month we spent in Turkey,” “The time we skied down the black diamond slope in the blizzard.”
Full moments occur only when we are fully absorbed in what we are doing; that is, when we are fulfilled in doing it. In a popular, mid-20th Century book, Stranger in a Strange Land, the women swooned when kissed by the hero. It turned out the reason was that when he kissed them, he was doing, and thinking, and intending nothing else whatever: the kiss itself had his full attention. That made it powerful. A friend of mine has an old tractor he lovingly repairs. Sometimes hours go by while he works to solve a problem and get it running again; he is unaware of the passage of time. One day I suddenly awoke from the trance I had been in for hours and realized how incredibly happy I am making art. Each of these episodes is just one moment, defined by the one thing that entirely absorbs the person’s careful attention for the duration of that moment: one kiss, one truck repair, one artwork.
In time, everything moves. It comes from someplace and it goes somewhere. Suppose we give our full attention to one athletic feat, one conversation, one painting emerging beneath our hands, or the sound of one note on a violin. Our attention traces the movement of that one living thing – its beginning, middle, and end – and presents it to our experience as one single whole in one hushed expanded moment. Not as a series of snapshots, but whole in one moment of presence. The moment can be short, like the glimpse of a passing friend; or long, like a twelve-month medical residency. Whatever its calendar duration, if the thing is one to our attention, then all of the past, presence, and future in the life movement of that one thing are gathered together into one moment’s presence in experience.
Presence
We human beings do accomplish something in our lives. We’re not ephemera of fleeting time brushed aside by indifferently wheeling galaxies. Something comes about through our attention and loving care – something worth it. Our waking awareness, our consciousness, our notice and enjoyment and use of things, our making of things, our admiration and poetry, our prayers, our song and our art and our love – these all accomplish something splendid that does not happen otherwise. That splendid something is: presence.
The word “presence” is almost entirely devoid of meaning to us. It does not ring in our ears; it is a limp paper bag in a wordy breeze. “Your presence is required.” “’Hollingsworth?’ ‘Present.’” “’Were you present when the awards were presented?’ ‘Yeh, I was there.’” The word is empty because presence is so much more important to us than we are prepared to understand, that really hearing it would require us to make large changes in our lives.
There is still one usage, a rare one not yet forgotten, in which we can hear the meaning of the word. That usage is: God’s presence. That expression rings. It says God. By saying it twice over – God’s presence – it says it so we hear it, at least once. Invoking that most powerful banished non-material reality as presence breaks the ban and invokes the real meaning of the word “presence” for us.
Think about it: Why do we make and present stage plays? Why operas, why dance? Why do we write – and read – novels? Why draw and paint? Why do we make, and love, music of all kinds – music, that incredibly powerful mover of our bodies and souls? Because all of it is a celebration of presence, of the miracle of life: that we are, that it is. Each day is new, living in the moment of presence. Each interaction between people, men and women, sons with fathers, boys and girls, kings and subjects, is amazing, tragic and hilarious. We sing their being. 
Presence is not a material reality. It is a transcendent reality. Presence does not mean, “Hey there it is, over there in the corner of the room, by the chair.” Presence means, God’s presence. Presence is a miracle. Why is there anything at all instead of … nothing? Presence is something … plus the human consciousness that the very existence of something is astounding. The close-fought basketball game that we watch breathlessly from the opening tip right down to the second overtime win, along with the screaming crowd – that is God’s presence. The single note of the violin that enters hearing like a globule of liquid gold shaping itself — is God’s presence. What animates the Islamists today who smolder with anger at the evils wrought on their ancestors by the Crusades? It is the presence of those ancestors in their lives now, the living history of their people and religion, which they maintain in presence through ritual and prayer. Yes, this too is God’s Presence.
Chalice
We are vessels. Our being vessels is the existential possibility that makes us who we are. We can form an opening, an arena in which the things that enter and exist there are recognized in wonder at their very existence. We do this in giving them our care and attention, which holds them in presence against the ravages of time. We create the human worlds: the webs of human relationship to the planet, the materials we scrape from it, the objects we shape with them, and the many uses to which we put them; and the webs of human relationships to one another coming and going on the planet amid these things of contemplation and use. We are this opening. To awaken and become present as this opening, this being-in-the-world – not as a drone but in the wonder of existence – this is the revelation of the world and all who dwell there and all the things existing there as God’s presence. Our awakening to welcome the transcendence of presence is the choice whereby the vessel is revealed as a chalice.
CHALICE OF GOLD
We often live only a truncated version of ourselves. We may be so overwhelmed in the hurry and stress of empty, fleeting public time that we can scarcely any longer find ourselves. For our being-in-the-world to become a chalice filled with presence takes opening ourselves to the possibility of living in a way that nothing in our everyday experience even hints at, much less encourages. On the contrary, everyday pressures and values often drag us down away from our existential possibility. But we do know of this possibility, we have known it all our lives; it is our secret. It gets buried under the detritus of a harried life.
So how can we get out from under the constraints against speaking and thinking of non-material realities and act on our often vague and awkward yearning for something to fill the void in our lives? Let’s break it down into three questions and answer them:
1) What can unearth the buried possibility of transcendence in our lives?
2) What will be the effect of the revelation on ravening time?
3) What new possibility may be opened for us by these changes?
(1) Love
Question: What can unearth the buried possibility of transcendence in our lives?
There is one clear and powerful answer to this. It is: love.
Love is the revelation to us of a transcendent reality. Love is the transcendent bursting forth out of nowhere to our complete surprise. That is what this phenomenon, which we call “love,” is. It does not come to us as a choice. The point at which we have a choice is in what to do with love once it arises within us: how to respond to it, whether to flee from it or embrace it, and how we shall go about those actions.
We ease out of the stressful empty rush of our lives in the world – like a snake shedding a skin – and are naked there, open, to be filled with that one thing beloved in that moment. It may be conversation – with a friend beautiful as a fine running horse in every natural feature as we watch the gestures of speech, the words we exchange firing our imagination and touching our soul with peace and confidence. It may be the music we listen to, the art we make, our partner and our lovemaking this moment; or anything else that evokes our unalloyed love.
Love is a miracle. Its arrival is amazing, and it is a deep joy. It shows us beauty: the beauty of a person’s gestures and movements, the beauty of sunlight dappling water, the beauty of a phrase or a whole sonata. Beauty is God’s presence.
Though love’s happening is a miracle, it does not often of itself miraculously alter the existing configurations of our life in the world. There are conflicts that may even be exacerbated by love. People deeply involved in pursuing their passions often neglect their loved ones, including the young children newly appearing in their midst. Loved ones may feel threatened by the spreading of love beyond their shared world – the time spent to pursue a passion in art, or music, or theater, or science. Sometimes when we are smitten we save our hearts by averting our attention. The patience love needs at times beggars imagination.
There is love and there is love; I mean any great passion that binds us with heartfelt and careful intent to one another, or to some thing; or to the creation, care, and attending to one of our worlds, with the transfiguring openness that moves us outside of ourselves in our attention and caring. It also need not be a “great passion.” Small passions will do. Taking care of something – watering the plants, pruning the roses; scrubbing the floor – is still caring. Minding the store, after all, is minding: giving it one’s attention, putting one’s mind to it. That takes caring. All
such small things also get swept away by the rush of time telling us, “There’s no time to … (clean my keyboard? Straighten my desk drawer?).”
We have always known of the transcendent. We have always had a secret love, a passion deep in the core of ourselves that no one else knew about. As time has passed, we may have forgotten about it or given up on ever being able to do anything about it. That makes us sad. The re-awakening of that passion, or another passion, later, is a gift beyond measure. Love, any love, also uncovers the secret passion of our hearts.
What opened my life up unexpectedly and wonderfully was living with a child again when I was a bit older and less self-absorbed, so that she actually came into presence for me, and love moved in. I have always found children to be revealing, the ones I’ve had time for. I was scarcely more than a baby myself when my firstborn had that effect on me, especially once she was walking and beginning to talk. Getting potty-trained; smearing her feces on the wall by her crib, as though in a primitive effort to write. But my first granddaughter turned me around years later. Her mom and she lived with us her first six and a half years. I had never really watched a child learn and grow before, not so closely and consistently. I had always before been too busy with very important adult things. And then luckily I began doing art again. Or maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. My love for my wife and all my children, and for my friends, and for my art have grown immensely from that fresh beginning. Love makes us bigger people. Love expands us.
The sign of love is play. One day at about age five, my granddaughter said to me, “Poppy, you’re the only one who really plays with me!” Playfulness expresses a happy and fulfilled enjoyment of life, a relaxed and confident openness to its turns and twists. Seriousness can be the necessary and appropriate demeanor of intense focus in carrying out a work of love – sinking the free throw, writing the crucial sentence, carving the folds of skin by the statue’s eyes, caring for the sick child. The playful joy bursting forth after this intense moment is our dancing in unconstrained bliss of our love.
Here are two lovable things about Plato: One, his dialogue Phaedrus suggests that babies are born from the divine into earthly life. They only gradually forget their divine origin; later, love recalls it to them. The other is in The Republic, where he tells us that children learn best in the openness and freedom of play.
(2) Time
Question: What will be the effect of the revelation of transcendence on ravening time?
The answer is: The revelation will slow time down and open the present moment.
We are our time. If I feel I don’t have enough time for the things I need to do, that means I feel there is not enough of me to go around. If there is not enough of me, then as a vessel I am unable to contain and hold all that I feel it is incumbent upon me to do. I cannot contain these things as true presences; I can manage no more than lip service, tokens, or hurried half-measures.
Rapid time emptiness is like a bad dream. It makes sleep walkers of us. Slowing down and coming into presence along with the presence of the people and things we care about is awakening. Listening. Looking. Speaking truth. Caring.
In the beginning when I turned again to art “fulltime,” as we say, I wanted to paint fast. That’s because I thought that, being such a genius, I would quickly do something fabulous. I would hit the California coast and drive away with a great, finished, plein air painting one or two hours later. Gradually I learned, from a master artist, simply to be in a place without concern for doing anything. From being there emerges a response to the presence that is there, and perhaps a painting. First, be there, feel the place, let it move into your heart; let love expand time for you in that world to know its presence. Then be there as a painter, if it comes.
Love gives us our time again, makes time our own. Love knows that we have all the time in the world for the things of love. We have time to do a good job cleaning the stove. We have time to make a kiss really a kiss. We have time to listen to what someone says to us rather than assuming that we already know what that person has to say – be it child or adult.
When I lived in Florida, I kept running into people who had lived for decades, and I actually listened to them. Every one had a fascinating story to tell. One old guy told me what it was like back when he’d go into town – seventeen miles – by horse and buggy. It was a whole day: morning to go in, afternoon hang out and buy stuff, evening to get home. Moving slowly. What hit me is, because we are moving so fast, we get mad and yell and swear when some fool suddenly pulls out in front of us on the highway. But at four miles an hour: peaceful.
Here’s the truth: time is an illusion. It comes with human existence and mirrors our reality. If we act on our existential possibility of opening to transcendent presence – if we dare to care – we can break through the illusion of time for a moment’s enduring presence…and even, rarely, a momentary eternity. As measured in time, such a moment may be brief and soon past: it is but the blink of an eye. As lived, that moment can span a life-transforming multitude of actions and events.
A single moment of presence may also last months or even years. The longer the calendar time, the more certain it is that other events also take place during that time. The one thing happening that unifies the moment is a continuous thread to which we return again and again, a thread never forgotten throughout the moment’s extent. Inexorable time presses against the long enduring moment of presence to make it end. We begin to forget what is essential to the moment. The passion fades, attention wanders. It may be possible to keep the energy alive to complete the project, but these are warning signs to be heeded. One has to assess: How much longer can I sustain this? What can I change to re-awaken it?
The mystery of time continues unabated. Love can transform our experience of time from an alien river flowing over us into a mansion in which we are at home. Making time our own means being housed by time instead of hounded by it.
Think of marriage. What a feat of memory and enduring love it is! What a miracle it is, to live in the house of marriage: to last and to be there through all the beginning passions, and then the children, the chaos, the waning passions, the hardships, the loss and grief; and then grandchildren, and aging, and learning to walk toward advancing death with an outstretched hand and a smile, as though meeting an old friend. It is indeed special, and different perhaps from anything a young couple imagines: hugging and kissing friends in greeting on the porch of the house of marriage!
We have all the time in the world. Back in the dark days when I was an employee, one morning before work I saw strawberries in the garden outside and wanted some for breakfast. Immediately I felt I had no time for that, I had to get to work. Then I stopped, breathed in, breathed out, and decided I had plenty of time. So I went out and picked strawberries. It was a delightful, refreshing moment. I brought them in, washed and stemmed them, and ate them. About then, I remembered time, and that I was going to work. I looked at the clock and saw that five minutes had elapsed. Then I knew that there is all the time in the world for the good things that sustain us. That’s the way it is: the present moment expands to embrace everything done with love. It’s always strawberry time.
(3) Creativity
Question: What new possibility may be opened for us by awakening transcendence and the slowing of time?
The miracle of caring passionately – even to the point of obsession – may offer us a new possibility: creativity.
Creativity is the human point of contact with the divine, the portal through which the headstrong animal, Homo sapiens, can reach beyond the material universe and passing time into the enduring present, becoming a vehicle through which the real, in time, can be changed. 
Genuine creativity – more than repetition, imitation, habit, and the other alternatives we call upon in making art – takes enormous expenditure of energy. We crack open our being in stretching out across the nothingness separating the past of art and our own abilities from the future of something we envisage that does not yet exist and is not even well-defined; gathering and holding these together and at the same time seizing onto the disparate fragments, patches, mediums, materials, and drifting metaphors of the fractured present to collect all this together into the paradoxical harmony of a sublime One creation.
So much of self-shielding has been cast aside to allow this moment! Visual artist, musician, actor, dancer, writer, mathematician, or kid with a wild idea to build a half-pipe skateboard ramp – we all enter a semi-trance state of intense, focused openness in moments when our beloved art draws us into it and begins to pour into us. The moment opens like a blossom upon whose fragrant petals we offer ourselves.
Creative work is guided by intuition, notwithstanding any use made of logic, concepts, reasoning, or other sophisticated intelligence as tools. The result for me of a dozen years intensely studying and teaching Philosophy, with great emphasis on careful reasoning, was this: I came to trust my intuition.
The important thing here is not the nature of intuition (what it is, how reliable it is), but trusting it. When we trust, we drop our shields, the self-protective devices we use to maintain control and keep others safely at bay. When we trust, we allow some other than ourselves to affect us: affect our feelings, our beliefs, our intentions, and our behaviors.
Trusting intuition is a part of our passion for our art. Trust is a core part of opening ourselves to become a vehicle of something that does not yet exist coming into that opening; and, through our work, becoming present.
When I was teaching Philosophy, I felt in the classroom that I became the focal point on which the energies of all those in the room converged, and I became the vehicle to give voice to the emerging thought. It was not my energy alone, nor my thought alone; I contributed to them on a par with others, concentrated them, and voiced them for us all. As an artist, something like that is true also, except that a great deal of the time I work physically alone. The energies that come through me may stem in part from the community of artists of which I am part. But much of what comes to me and comes through me seems even more definitively than was true in the classroom to originate in the spirit of something that does not yet exist. My openness allows it to come into me; it finds in me a kindred spirit and a vehicle through which it can come into presence.
Creativity is much more varied, and often more complex, than the dialogue of individual initiative and the transforming vision to which the individual surrenders. There are many forms of creativity other than the ones that make their way into concert halls, theaters, libraries, galleries, and other halls of fame. A few that spring readily to mind are: teaching, childcare, gardening, cooking, and quilting. Creation also often is not one-directional. It stops, backs up, erases, purposely destroys or scratches out, and starts over. Destruction is the invigorating darkness in the dialogue, against which the light of creation flashes. There is always a harmony of opposites, a tension and resolution of dissonance, in fine creative work, and the lingering mystery of the unresolved. That harmony in dissonance is the song that creativity sings.
Indeed, the first human language was song, from the exuberance of our spirits at the transcendence experienced; and in playfulness and fierce pride; in our warrior mode; and as lovers of God. We cannot take our current prosaic language of dull facts and bright ideas as a model of first language – it was surely so much more full-throated and entranced; much closer to birdsong!
A Challenge to Our Creativity
There are cultures in which time bears little resemblance to the speeding train of ours. On Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands, as recently as ten years ago, there were no mealtimes: people ate whenever they were hungry, and in whoever’s house they happened to be near. The practice was to keep a pot on the fire all day – for example, with fish in it, and everyone was welcome to help themselves. Third world countries are famous for paying little attention to time; “tomorrow” means anytime in the next several days. In warm countries, people often close all the shops and nap in the afternoon. Mmmm, sounds good!
A difference has always been recognized, though, between the ordinary day and special moments of presence. The times and spaces of ordinary life are familiar and homely. Though they contain huge lots that are beyond the ken of scientific materialism, they do not traffic heavily in the truly transcendent. To mark the difference between the quotidian and special moments of presence, older cultures designated sacred spaces and times. They were places to go to and to be in, devoted to remembering the transcendent – ancestors and gods – and making them present. We, too, have our churches, synagogues, and mosques, whose function is (or was) similar. Sacred times also were set aside for remembering; like our Sunday, Sabbath, and the daily prayers of Muslim practice.
Sacred spaces and times are paradoxical. They exist in time and in the world, always under the threat of becoming worldly institutions; and this does sometimes happen. Yet they exist in order to negate the force of time and worldliness. They, too, mirror the human reality in being possible, not inevitable, as genuine spaces and present moments of refuge from ravening time.
Genuinely special, sacred, places exist even now in the midst of our hectic time, like hidden nesting places in a great bush shaken by winds; secrets, really. They can occur in the most unlikely places. Here is one: The public education system in the USA can be immersed in the worst sorts of worldly stresses in its institutional and administrative structures. Hidden away in the midst of all that nonsense are classrooms. Teachers know that once the door closes, they and those too-many students are alone together. A really good teacher creates a sacred time and space in that room for that moment of class time, touching and being touched by the students’ souls, all of them brushed by the transcendent.
Too often, though, only the bare idea of the special time and space is left for us, without the content. Many people, who work at jobs with rigid time schedules, regularly, on Fridays (and other days), after work go to a favorite bar. It becomes a quasi-sacred time and space devoted to “feeling human again,” slaking their hunger for simple camaraderie, and dulling the pain of stress. Many speak frankly about medicating themselves to keep going.
As a culture, surely we can do better. We need urgently to nourish forms of sacred space and sacred time among our friends and in our own communities. The most readily available model, and therefore likeliest to succeed, is to observe the existing traditions: Make Sunday, or the Sabbath, a day of rest and quiet meditation. Go to Synagogue or Mosque or Church and participate in services. We need not believe the literal truth of words spoken. The feeling is what counts: the quiet, the slow pace, the attention to something else besides the dross that occupies us in our broken lives at work. We may also discover nuggets of truth.
There are alternatives. Any locale has its communities. Our local community of artists has small sub-groups of those who work together, freely combining and re-combining for various purposes. A Thursday Night drawing group has met regularly for a dozen years. Many people belong to book clubs or other small groups regularly gathering for a shared purpose. As time goes by, group members come increasingly to know and trust one another, sharing more of themselves, developing real love for one another. The times of such gatherings can become something close to sacred.
In the old cultures, the most important consideration was tribal continuity and remembrance that held the body of the tribe in presence, refusing to allow time to devour it: denying the finality of death. The sacred space was often a fair-sized building whose structure itself – supporting columns, ridge pole, roof, side walls – represented (and was taken as) the body of the tribe, literally, parts of the building designated as body parts (ribs, etc). Inside, supporting columns and walls were deeply carved to represent (be) particular ancestors, tribal exploits, and gods. 
The enormous creative challenge of our time is to find our sacred, to build our sacred spaces and set aside our sacred times. I mean those that speak to us authentically, not merely in imitation of something that someone else once did. One singularly striking truth about sacred spaces in the old cultures is the tribal meeting place – the “long house” or the marae of the New Zealand Maori. This was not a building shell to which carvings of ancestors and gods were added. From the ground up, the building itself was shaped as a vessel housing the gods. Where in that might we find our meaning for our lives and our ways? The people who built those marae a thousand years ago on the great islands of New Zealand were not following principles of engineering in erecting structures that would stand the test of time. They created those principles by building dwelling places suitable for their ancestors and gods.
We drift in a vast sea of population across gargantuan geography. We must come back to the small to build the significant. Three of us – and still more, thirty – of one mind are far more powerful than the babble of three hundred thousand drowning each other out. What will be our marae? What will become our Sabbath?
James Millikan, Ph.D.
Forestville, California
July 1, 2009
