Time's Mysterious Flow, Poetry, and Hummingbirds.

When you spend most of your life in midair, how does time and travel through it differ from the way time falls, softly, quieting the air and stilling itself, when you're seated among your throng of thoughts?

Most of my days and nights are spent inside that stilled throng. But sometimes time stops in its track. I look over at the bird feeder and at that precise moment a hummingbird dives over to poke a tongue into the sugar water while I watch the spinning blur of wings and am suspended.

Some mornings seem arranged by a muse who is a conductor of time, or coincidence, of meetings, and of ideas as evanescent as swiftly whirling wings. I'm thinking today of my brother's surgery later, of how long a hummingbird lives, and of the fall of each petal from the bouquets that filled the house a week ago, on my birthday. I'm feeling flurried with all the good wishes, and thinking of how time keeps us in the illusion of separateness. But only when we think of time as a forward progression. That's why time-travel interests me, and why I chose to set my novel's story in sudden shifts of time, with its attendant meetings and rearrangements.

We meet in the etheric space of memory, if we really think about time, and that destroys the idea of forward progression. Of course, Einstein's theory says time is an illusion. So do the Vedas and Buddhists. Poets, of course, already know all about time's mysterious flow. We hover in it, sipping the nectar of future possibilities while also drinking long drafts of the past and savoring its revelations. We are always putting things together while hovering midair on whirling wings.

And now the clock is ticking its illusion and I must get to work, raising money for some good causes.