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A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.
Print is predictable and impersonal, conveying information in a mechanical transaction with the reader’s eye. Handwriting, by contrast, resists the eye, reveals its meaning slowly, and is as intimate as skin.
the length of an orbit is called a tone. Isn’t that beautiful? Like the music of the spheres. The longest orbital period is thirteen years, which establishes the fundamental tone.
Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time . . . In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.
that’s the way the temple felt to me, like a core sample from another time,
A name, Ruth thought, could be either a ghost or a portent depending upon which side of time you were standing.
He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature,
a botanical intervention he called the NeoEocene. He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing. Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants.
the texture of time passing. No writer, even the most proficient, could re-enact in words the flow of a life lived,
I slipped through my school days like a wisp of cloud, like a drifting patch of humidity, barely there,
Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
Our feeling of alive has no real edge or boundary. So we Japanese people say that our life sometimes feels unreal, just like a dream.
Nowadays, in modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Even Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows of forms. So this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.
when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
When old Jiko talks about the past, her eyes get all inward-turning, like she’s staring at something buried deep inside her body in the marrow of her bones.
Jiko calls her cataracts kuuge which means “flowers of emptiness.”
some words have kotodama,56 which are spirits that live inside a word and give it a special power.
Does the half-life of information correlate with the decay of our attention? Is the Internet a kind of temporal gyre, sucking up stories, like geodrift, into its orbit? What is its gyre memory? How do we measure the half-life of its drift?
The gyre’s memory is all the stuff that we’ve forgotten.
there is no God in the Japanese tradition, no monolithic ordering authority in narrative—and
“Do you know how lucky we are?” Oliver was saying. “To live in a place where the water is still clean? Where we can still eat the shellfish?” She thought about the Salish who used to tend these gardens. She wondered when the last oyster was harvested in the beds around Manhattan. She thought about the leak in Fukushima. She thought about old Jiko’s temple, clinging to the side of the mountain in Miyagi. Or was it? “I wonder how much longer we have . . . ,” she said.
“A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean,” she said. “A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.”
subspecies of the Earthquake Catfish is the yonaoshi namazu or World-Rectifying Catfish, which is able to heal the political and economic corruption in society by shaking things up. Belief in the World-Rectifying Catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence. The World-Rectifying Catfish targeted the business class, the 1
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I tried to explain that it would be quicker and easier just to throw the old bags away and buy new ones, and then they would have more time for zazen, but Jiko disagreed. Sitting zazen, washing freezer bags, same thing, she said.
Jiko says that everything has a spirit, even if it is old and useless, and we must console and honor the things that have served us well.
bellies and fanning their sweaty red faces, which is just how August feels, as Obon approaches, like the whole round world is pregnant with ghosts,
Finally I achieved my goal and resolved my childhood obsession with now because that’s what a drum does. When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and the thunder. Jiko says that this is an example of the time being. Sound and no-sound. Thunder and silence.
Like her, we must keep up our studies even as civilization collapses around us.
