Still Sundays

May 22

A people without time, like stories beyond time. Time is a lover whose eyes never get old.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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5:oo a.m. came covered in dense clouds but stillness is not overcast whatsoever.

New York City, hush-little-baby.

What to make of the continuous torrential downpour in the last week? Sky, are your lungs okay? New York City sky: a wailing baby that leaves the adult to wonder if the baby has any air left only to hear another whimpering sob fall. I used to wonder if babies can die from incessant crying when I was a young child. Now I wonder if adults aren’t already dead if they don’t ever cry.

I am surprised when my mother says something about writing on Sunday morning before Sunday. It’s a surprise. Always. It feels like a reminder for something significant and necessary that I may forget to do: pick up the laundry from the cleaners, or pay a bill, or call my grandfather, or … write.

Sundays are not promised and stillness owes me nothing. I wake up to dreams gently setting the tablecloth for some picnic. The stoic silence of the early morning is attractive every time. Time is a lover whose eyes never get old although everything ages.

My mother has Time’s clear eyes.

Covering thoughts with words on Sundays feels like snuggling a little closer to Time.

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Time, I discovered my kind of people.

I came across this article recently where researchers have ‘discovered’ an Amazonian tribe that has no abstract concept of time. My people. I knew there was a reason I have never been able to wear a watch. My biorhythm is allergic to tick-tock.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space. The article said this is a controversial finding.

I don’t see the controversy.

The Amondawa language has no word for “time”, or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year”.  The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community. But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space. Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis”.

Ah! The controversy: mapping hypothesis. Structure for the thinking involved. Must create arrows and boxes. Visas for memories. Security guards for dreams.

Some stories linger through space and generations beyond time.

Why the surprise to find people who live stories the rest make up?

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My favorite our those still Sundays wear stillness is a hallucinogen for the now.  For example, mornings like today I when I wake up so early that I can even take a nap before noon. Noon—when stillness passes into its ghost form until it returns again either at twilight or midnight. Stillness is a shape-shifting phantom.

It is a gracious Sunday drenched with stillness because the world did end yesterday.  For many people.

The world is also offered for our beginning.

Every day.

New York City is drowsy from the cough syrup offered against drench.

Naps are a cool marble breeze in the hammock of stillness.

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