I tend to speak distance in time. Ask me how far from my house to anyplace, and I will tell you: Phoenix in two hours. Home in twelve. Ten minute walk to school, a full day's travel to La Paz. I know nothing in miles.
The metaphor holds: ask me how close I am to my best friend, and I will tell you I have known her for fifteen years.
Time is a construction. One of my favorite things about this school that if you ask someone the time, they are as likely to look up to the sky as down at their wrist. Once I learned to mark it by the stars, and time turned a slow pirouette around a still center. Once I sat for three days beneath a tree without eating. After the first day the hunger plateaued, and time was measured in pages, liters, and the pulsing drone of flies.
Arizona doesn't bother with daylight savings; I think we're the only state in the country. The Navajo reservation does, but Hopi also doesn't. Concentric circles of time: during the drive to Utah an hour appears and disappears five times. Bars and gas stations open and close an hour earlier on one side of the road. Daturas open and close in pale unison straight through.
Time is an illusion, and like so many things, relative at best. How far am I from love? It takes sixteen hours to drive to the redwoods, ten seconds to call my parents. A week of hiking to remember my own skin. This morning I watched the sun rise over juniper hills. I find that I haven't missed the hour; I can't imagine where it would go.
The metaphor holds: ask me how close I am to my best friend, and I will tell you I have known her for fifteen years.
Time is a construction. One of my favorite things about this school that if you ask someone the time, they are as likely to look up to the sky as down at their wrist. Once I learned to mark it by the stars, and time turned a slow pirouette around a still center. Once I sat for three days beneath a tree without eating. After the first day the hunger plateaued, and time was measured in pages, liters, and the pulsing drone of flies.
Arizona doesn't bother with daylight savings; I think we're the only state in the country. The Navajo reservation does, but Hopi also doesn't. Concentric circles of time: during the drive to Utah an hour appears and disappears five times. Bars and gas stations open and close an hour earlier on one side of the road. Daturas open and close in pale unison straight through.
Time is an illusion, and like so many things, relative at best. How far am I from love? It takes sixteen hours to drive to the redwoods, ten seconds to call my parents. A week of hiking to remember my own skin. This morning I watched the sun rise over juniper hills. I find that I haven't missed the hour; I can't imagine where it would go.
