Thoughts about my Aunt Krystal
Her Watch
It’s a small watch. Leather band around a plastic wrist (or it may as well be). The gold hands spin around slowly, silently, inevitably.
The body (to which the plastic wrist belongs) doesn’t look like her. She was full of life.
Her heart, the curse of her tightly woven hair (Byler hair) according to my father’s medical mythology, never matched her dreams. The pain this inferior muscle caused her was an echo of the tyranny of our time and space. Its arrhythmia limits our vision. Some moments last too long. Some spaces are far too small. What happens outside the dialectical relationships of time, space, matter and energy? Can life exist? Is there anything outside of the process? Could this be the silence between the beating of our clocks? The space between seconds? What we think of as “moments” of “pure being” when we are informed by the Spirit of Life? Those ecstatic events of observation, contemplation, understanding; those gaps when laughter or crying overtakes our existential reality?
Of course it is. That’s why she was so animated: so passionate about life and love beyond the temporal and spatial. Outside of our time and space and the language with which it is measured there is only the fullness of knowing, being, feeling. Beyond and encompassing the existential and metaphysical realities and discourses with which we are familiar. Life/love no longer requires movement. The process is over. This is why she is silent; why her clock stopped. She doesn’t need it any more. She has become. She is a pure being.
(Darren Byler, Hagerstown, Maryland, January 11, 2006)
She used to say: Desires are given to us by God so we can taste a little bit of Heaven. The pleasure we get from eating a piece of moist chocolate cake is a glimpse of what it will be like. This is what pleasure is for.
It’s a small watch. Leather band around a plastic wrist (or it may as well be). The gold hands spin around slowly, silently, inevitably.
The body (to which the plastic wrist belongs) doesn’t look like her. She was full of life.
Her heart, the curse of her tightly woven hair (Byler hair) according to my father’s medical mythology, never matched her dreams. The pain this inferior muscle caused her was an echo of the tyranny of our time and space. Its arrhythmia limits our vision. Some moments last too long. Some spaces are far too small. What happens outside the dialectical relationships of time, space, matter and energy? Can life exist? Is there anything outside of the process? Could this be the silence between the beating of our clocks? The space between seconds? What we think of as “moments” of “pure being” when we are informed by the Spirit of Life? Those ecstatic events of observation, contemplation, understanding; those gaps when laughter or crying overtakes our existential reality?
Of course it is. That’s why she was so animated: so passionate about life and love beyond the temporal and spatial. Outside of our time and space and the language with which it is measured there is only the fullness of knowing, being, feeling. Beyond and encompassing the existential and metaphysical realities and discourses with which we are familiar. Life/love no longer requires movement. The process is over. This is why she is silent; why her clock stopped. She doesn’t need it any more. She has become. She is a pure being.
(Darren Byler, Hagerstown, Maryland, January 11, 2006)
She used to say: Desires are given to us by God so we can taste a little bit of Heaven. The pleasure we get from eating a piece of moist chocolate cake is a glimpse of what it will be like. This is what pleasure is for.
posted by Darren Byler at 8:31 PM
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