No time

Time moves slowly down here in the tropics. But no, in fact time doesn’t pass slowly down here in the tropics. Rather, down here I experience time as unmoving and almost insensate. It doesn’t weigh upon me, seem as if has stopped, race forward . . .  Down here I become immersed in the quotidian and I do not notice time. In a sense, time is irrelevant. I move to my rhythms . . . no, in the freedom I discover my rhythms or perhaps I invent them here in the tropics. I know that returning to the North and snow and cold all will change, but perhaps I will have changed and also my experience of time. The other night the wind had blown down a power line and for 24 hours we had no electricity. Whereas in Minneapolis/Saint Paul I would have grumbled, down here I really remained totally unconcerned, read while I could and slept when it became dark. Of course the internet wouldn’t function but then, down here there was nothing I needed to use it for. Or even had need to do: I was content for the most part to maintain some isolation and distance. I certainly didn’t want to follow the news—I was content not to know. In the mornings we have coffee on our porch/deck and then walk to and on the beach. E. brings her phone so she can take pictures of things like crabs and me, but I leave my appliances home: I am not concerned with how many steps I have walked. I just want to walk until I decide to stop and when I do so I just hope I am in some near proximity to our chairs. I have not for years worn a watch and so I do things as I want and not when it is time for anything to be done. What doesn’t get done today might still not get done again tomorrow. Showering is occasional, optional and somewhat irrelevant.  In the mornings we sit at the beach for an hour or more enjoying the sounds of the waves crash on the sands. I say an hour or more but in fact, I don’t know the extent of time passed. In those moments at the beach I think of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking;” the poet’s lines seem to me to echo the cadences of the eternal waves. And from the lonely bird mourning his mate the solitary singer learns that the word he has sought is death and from that moment of recognition all his song arose! The awareness of mortality enriches daily life. I know mortality.
            After out morning outing on the beach we return home to breakfast, such as it may be. Out on the deck we write and read and Elizabeth maintains her lists. I am keeping a Costa Rica journal and posting some of it on the blog which is where you might be reading this piece. We nap, of course, and then pick up our beach things and return to it for another visit. Returning to our Airbnb, we read a bit more, enjoy a cocktail hour and decide what to eat for dinner and where to do it. Half the time we eat out and the other half we eat in: I cook and E. cleans. After dinner we might return to the beach to watch the sunset (the beautiful sun sets slowly and then all at once), and then we return to our books and bed. As far as we can tell there is no night life here which doesn’t disturb us at all.
            The days are thus very ordinary: there is nothing that has to be done and there is nowhere to which we have to go. I recall in the film “Into Great Silence” the image of the monk walking slowly in the cloistered walls of the monastery and I remember wondering why he just didn’t walk faster to get where he is going, but I realized that, in fact, he wasn’t going anywhere and he had therefore, no need to hurry along. When he got where he was going it would be time enough. Down here in Costa Rica I appreciate his unhurried pace: I don’t have anywhere I must be and no reason to move except according to my leisure.      

            The days are indeed ordinary. Vladimir and Estragon despair: they complain nothing happens! That nothing contents me. I discovered in my journal this comment from Marilyn Robinson’s Homecoming: “That most moments were substantially the same did not detract from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.” I do not attend unblinking attention to the ordinary: I immerse myself in it and do not feel the time but