a year since Dad died. doesn’t feel like that at all. a year. one of an endless cycle of circles around a Light. how else would we know, without abstract methodologies of measurement, except to see that things are the same, and different each time around. time may be a continuous phenomena, but it is variable for different beings, and states of being. why not? the willows, aspen, poplar, and birch are all transforming. rapidly. along with the snow marching down the mountainsides. by the time I get back from Norway in three weeks, this place will be stark, winter. time passes. flooding all corners of the sensual world, and affecting change in all things. when in the pool, at each deep inhalation there are smells of the sticky-sweet poplar here, almost a taste. it’s slightly different from the Cottonwood of the desert Southwest, but the smell brings a strong memory to surface. I’ve talked about this before in other places of this travelog. the smell of trees.
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously — as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. — Isabelle Allende, House of Spirits