April 28, 2010
Elongated Seasonsal Change

It’s spring again. It came early in New York, and then I went to Colorado during a blizzard, which gave way to another frigid beginning-of-spring. I got to see the end of summer in Ohio, and the beginning of fall in London and Paris. (I am fortunate that I get to change perspective whenever I feel like it.) There was hardly any winter for me this year, with the extra long autumn that began early in London, and late back in New York, and a winter that sped into an early New York spring – a spring that seemed to last forever once out west, in the mountains, experiencing its birth all over again.

Seasons of change like fall into winter or winter into spring, seem the most dramatic, and it’s been interesting to have these two changes stretched and skewed and elongated this past year. As if you could take a picture of a digital clock, just as it changed from 11:59 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. – literally changing minutes, hours, a.m. to p.m., and even the calendar date – frozen for pondering for way longer than the split second during which it actually occurred. These stretched out seasonal changes made me feel like I had jumped into a moment in time and spread my arms and spun around and found lots of unexpected space in which to run and frolic.

Shifting perspectives made the impossible seem possible – that we are not just on this relentless fall forward into the future, but that there is space, even within moments of great change, for experience and pondering. Changing time zones and continents and climates with the simple hop aboard an airplane made it obvious that the way I am thinking of the world in any one moment relies heavily upon where I am and what I am experiencing. Landing in a snowstorm in Colorado, after driving with the windows down to the airport in New York, was enough to make me see, that a single moment contains a lot more than we usually think. It contains a blizzard, and a sunny-breezy day; it contains light and dark, depending on where on earth you find yourself; it contains peace and it contains tumult.

Maps are great because you can see all the places you are not, and begin to conceive of “elsewhere.” Quantum physics says, it is impossible to measure both the location and the velocity of an object at the same time. It is 1 p.m. in New York, and 11 a.m. in Denver. Doesn’t all of this boggle your mind?

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