Redtree Times

In the Pocket of Time, 2014

Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.
There is none to count thy minutes.

Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers.
Thou knowest how to wait.

Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.

We have no time to lose,
and having no time we must scramble for a chance.
We are too poor to be late.

And thus it is that time goes by
while I give it to every querulous man who claims it,
and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.

At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut;
but I find that yet there is time.

–Rabindranath Tagore, Endless Time

I think about time quote often. Maybe too often, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s the fact that our time here is limited. You can’t gather and hoard time and our time on this earth is finite. As Tagore writes above: We have no time to lose,/ and having no time we must scramble for a chance./ We are too poor to be late.

Like the deity to which Tagore is comparing his earthly self, our time is not endless.

But it must be enough.

I guess that means that we should make each moment count for something.

I don’t know anymore.

I feel guilty talking about our limited time in the light of the Russian atrocities being exposed in Ukraine in recent days. Those people, those civilians, in those mass graves or lying in the streets after being executed, with hands bound behind their backs, came unwillingly to the end of their time here. They didn’t have the luxury of thinking about the limits of time while being safe and warm and full bellied.

Was their time enough?

Makes me wonder what we can do, without sounding hyperbolic or overly hawkish. I don’t want a war, don’t want to sacrifice the time of others’ lives. But all that I can think is that something must be done now, even if it comes at a great price.

Once evil has stepped forward and shown itself, it must be confronted, or it will take us to unspeakable depths.

History teaches us that all too well. But we hold on to a belief that this time, this emergence of evil, will be somehow different, that we can just go without being affected, that we can go on worrying about our remaining time with no concern for preserving the time of others. 

That’s the same belief folks in Europe in the late 1930’s held. We here in America certainly felt that way. There was little forethought and little belief that evil was moving in on them. Just a belief that it would all work out without them needing to spend a moment of their precious time on it.

I saw a sign from a recent rally in support of Ukraine that said: If you’re wondering what you would have done against the Nazis, you’re doing it now.

That says it all. We all want to believe we would react differently if we were faced with such a situation. That we would have surely recognized what was happening and would reacted heroically.

But maybe we are facing a form of it now. Like those folks in the 1930’s, we have no way of telling what will happen, that the worst might possibly come to be while we sit, disbelieving what we are seeing.

Hindsight is of little comfort when facing evil.

History teaches that whenever evil and barbarism shows its true face, we must fight against it. To paraphrase Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anne Applebaum: Not so that the worst might not happen again. No, because the worst will happen again if we don’t fight against it.

That’s my early Sunday morning rant for the week. Thank you for your time, if you stayed with this to this point. For this week’s Sunday Morning music, here’s a song from my beloved Kinks that I haven’t heard in years, Time Song.

Seemed to fit.