Renaissance?

In The Fantastics The Narrator muses "You wonder how these things begin..." because each occurrence appears seamless, a chain connecting moments so intimately that experience is uninterrupted until the tyranny of mechanical time creates the illusion of minutes and seconds, ripping the flow of being into millions of little bits of time as though they were the true measure of who we are.

And yet, something does occur, often monumental, and we are never the same, we are changed in the flow of being. The something might be a person, people, happenings, cataclysms... all articulating Time, Being, and Experience. We write millions of words, probably billions, trying to understand these occurrences, with great titles like Being and Time, Flow, As Time Goes By, and so on. Time is relentless, but it flows and ripples, and there are deep eddies, rapid currents, and still waters. It is much more complex than the mechanical measurement of intervals. Time is Space, and Space is Time. Flowing.

Some days ago, I encountered a moment that transformed my awareness... and now I write in an attempt to pursue languaging as inquiry, as a tool of discovery, attempting to understand the moment. Even as I write, this moment measures time and becomes a fixture in reality.

Words falling on the page... Time captured as inquiry... trying to penetrate the mystery...noticing Now, but remembering, retrieving the fragments, trying to penetrate the essence. The moment is red hot in my mind, erupting like a quasar... enigmatic...something happening, an interaction... sparks fly, and consciousness attempts to attend the moment, to notice intensely, and to save the essence so that meaning might be extracted. In a moment I feel a sea change. I struggle to find the meaning...as though understanding somehow might make the past tangible. The past has tentacles to the present... entanglement connects eternity, reaches across the infinite stretch of time/space, and I know that somehow I am changed.

Here as I write, I am searching for words, for gestures that might help me understand the how an apparently simple diversion can account for such seismic change in the direction of my life. Having lived many years, I have experienced several such changes. I regarded such changes as renaissances, but I had concluded I would not be called again to such a rebirth.

How many renaissances . . .
How many times
Will the silence invite me
To the feast?
I toast to festivals of years. . .
Here's to the painful isolation,
Here's to the innocence
Now lost. . .
Here's to the quiet wonder
Here's to the mystery of awe
To chaos on the edge of order . . .
Too soon
The days of opportunity dissolve,
The inward possibilities remain inert,
And all that might be and might have been
Is gone.