esterday and today creeps at this petty pace...Today, or even more accurately, yesterday is the day that I welded the first faeries on the gate. I realize for you it is probably the same day (today?) as no one is reading these blogs as I put them up there. If anyone is reading this (now?) it is as a complete set because I sent out the url to family and friends sometime in the future.
Time is very confusing. Not so much because events happen in a specific order. I used to think that the phrase "Time is God's way of making sure everything does not happen at once" was funny, a joke. Now, I am beginning to think that it is one of the more profound statements ever made, disguising as a joke.
But the confusion of time to me is not the sequence of events so much as the utter darkness around anything but the "Now". The fact that Now is itself a mixture of different times is not so much a problem either. Looking out at the night sky and seeing a star as it was 4 or a hundred years ago, or even knowing that I could look through a high powered telescope and see 4 billion year old galaxies - in the Now, only seems to follow logically.
You could even, I suppose, find a set of celestial objects that represent the continuum of time. For instance, you might be able to find, in one field of view, stars from all points in time for a thousand years. Such that your eye, living in the Now could absorb light that originated 4 years ago, 5 years ago, 6 years ago .... 1003 years ago. 1000 stars, each as they were in different parts of the past. A mock continuum of time.
But the real dilemma is the utter inability to experience the same object in multiple time frames. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that I am enamored with video recording. It allows you to "go back in time". One of the things that I have always wanted to do is to take pictures of a person, preferably starting at a very young age, always in the same location and pose, over many years, and make a video of the person as they are in their many ages.
Watching that video would begin to scratch the surface of the confusion I feel with time. Things like mountains and oceans and have never seemed "real" to me in the sense that they are as they are for only a short time. A mountain was once an ocean and an ocean bottom was once on top of a mountain. Sea shells at 14,000 feet eventually taken back to the ocean by the streams and rivers of time.
But the feeling is even worse with people. I often try to see the little girl in an older lady or maybe how she looked "in her prime". Seeing a brown twinged picture on a fireplace mantel of a young soldier innocently being photographed before being sent off to the gruesomeness of war and then looking at the old man who is what has become of that young soldier.... and then wondering about all the life between the picture and the old man.... Where are all those "Nows" now?
When I was a kid, maybe 7 or 8, I looked into the eyes of my 30 year old self (I could not imagine myself beyond that ripe old age) and the 30 year old me seemed to be saying "have mercy on me, make right decisions, don't screw it up this time." It was a powerful feeling that I had such sway over someone so old. But very confusing.
(another side note: one of the things that tickles this part of my brain is David and Solomon. I have a picture in my mind of young David as a Giant Killer, Warrior, King - a young picture, never out of his twenties - thirties at the most. I have a picture in my mind of Solomon - wise king, white hair, grandfatherish. Occasionally I will ask my brain to reconcile the fact that David is Solomon's father.)
So what does all of this have to do with Sheneal, the next faerie to be welded to the gate? Sheneal is the time keeper, not like a watch keeps time but like a dam keeps a river. She stores time. As it passes she doesn't use it but simply allows it to accumulate in her. When she needs it she can tap into her reserves and pull out, say, a day or an extra month and use it all in one Now.
She is very old so she has accumulated quite a bit of reserve. She has spent many a human lifespans simply gathering time. In those years she has watched babies die of old age and grandsons fill the shoes of their grandfather's youth. You may have noticed that her wings are not filled in everywhere - that is because she is not entirely in this "Now" and those portions of her wings are the flimsiest and sometimes do not show up in our Now at all.
So Sheneal takes her place on the gate. If a rose grows, buds and sheds its petals overnight I will know that she is up to something. I wonder what I would do if I had time that I could spend where and when I needed it. I suppose I would save it for life and death type situations or being mischievous....
