It Is Time It Were Time

I have been feeling pretty low the last few days, trying to focus on what is good but still, inevitably, beaten back by the sadness of being alone this time of year.  Fitzgerald wasn't wrong when he wrote, "[S]o we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."  It is so easy to live there, in the past, when things weren't--most likely--better than they are now, but from this vantage point, they seemed to be.

Just as Jay and Daisy have glorified, idealized, and fetishized the love they once shared, during the holidays it is easy to slip into patterns that celebrate the good in the past without acknowledging what led to the present.

I don't want to dwell on how I got here.  It is not a new story or a particularly interesting one, but today, I am trying to live not in Fitzgerald's world, but in Paul Celan's.  He wrote:

It is time the stone made an effort to flower.

Time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

In an effort to honor his words, to look forward rather than back, to be hopeful rather than hurt, here's what I did today.  I can't seem to get the sideways ones turned around...maybe in the morning.