Time is a jail that we’ve built for ourselves, I think as I look at the clock and realize this post is due by some daunting hour of the morning. How could this day have been contained by a big hand and little hand on the face of a clock?
Sometimes, or some places, the clock flies apart. Human footprints 3,000 years old were discovered in Arizona recently during a road project north of Tucson. Archaeologists came upon what had once been a layer of wet clay marked by the tracks of passing adults, children and even a domestic dog. The impressions were left as if they’d just walked through yesterday. An article in the Arizona Daily Star described the find, an archaeologist brushing away sand and dirt, revealing “the impression of a heel, then toes and finally a complete set of human footprints.” The archaeologist who made the discovery said, “The closer I came to the toe I started shaking.”
This is what it feels like to step out of time. We break from cell walls made of seconds, hours, days, centuries and millennia. Somehow we think we’ve got a better grasp on time than the average Stone Age hunter-gatherer whose language likely had no past or future tense. I think otherwise. I believe we lost something. It’s why we start shaking when we make contact with the ancient past. We realize that it’s actually real. Our language and its many tenses has turned the past into an abstraction. We start to believe that because the photos are black and white, history was colorless. Finding a footprint from thousands of years ago, color comes flooding back in.
The footprints were discovered between Interstate 10 and the busy four-lane of Silverbell Road. All around, people bustled, cars racing past, passengers scrambling in daily circles to the office and back, dropping off kids, picking them up.
I grew up in this region, born in one of the densely packed satellites of Phoenix where most people have little concept about the history beneath their feet. In high school, I’d climb the lone desert mountains sticking out of the city like islands. On these juts of rock I found petroglyphs, spirals and the curled horns of bighorn sheep rendered by pecking with a stone or antler. Under the landing pattern of passenger jets, their silver bellies reflecting loops of freeways and interchanges, I found broken pieces of pre-Columbian pottery. Every find made time seem thinner. The sherds of brownish red ware, some painted with truncated designs, turned time into a gauze I could see through. Faces were on the other side, people like me glancing up from their daily chores as they lifted an irrigation civilization from the desert basin of the Salt and Gila rivers.
Several years ago I visited a construction project a couple miles from where I was born. A new light rail station was going in where there used to be a parking lot. When the asphalt was pulled back, hundreds of ancient graves were found below. Pam Cox, one of the archaeologists working on the recovery efforts, sat on the tailgate of a truck. She lit a cigarette and pointed to where a bulldozer was now working. She said that the space being leveled had been the burial of a young woman alongside the remains of a fetus. She said it looked like a miscarriage.
“That’s probably how she died, in childbirth,” Cox said. “They buried her with her unborn son.”
She mentioned excavating a young girl buried by herself. Shell bracelets were stacked up her left arm and all around her was a cache of pots, pendants, carved fetishes, and a necklace made of 185 polished shell beads. They’d taken to calling her “the princess,” not because of any known social hierarchy, but because that’s what you might call a young girl surrounded by so many offerings.
Listening to our conversation, the crew chief came over. He told me that they assigned most of the human remains to Cox.
I asked if she had some special qualification.
“No,” she said, not looking at me.
“Tell him,” the crew chief urged. “Tell him why.”
Cox looked back and considered my face for a moment. She said, “Because I cry the whole time.”
Some people are not contained by time. I believe this was true for this woman. A death a thousand years ago is hardly different than one today.
Maybe it’s all too much to bear, so we make clocks and calendars. We build walls around us to say this is now, that was yesterday, and tomorrow is not here yet. We chop the flow of events into digestible pieces. Sometimes, those pieces blend back together. The time between then and now becomes one time. It is why you sometimes tremble, why you cry. This is what it feels like to be free.
Image: shutterstock
We CAN still cry. If we didn’t create some manner of separation we would mourn constantly. Perhaps a sense of time is what allows us to celebrate, to delineate between what is lost and the possibilities of what is yet to come. It IS, in my own opinion, of course, important to understand that we are, physiologically identical to the people that were here before, and therefore imperative that we occasionally drop that separation and allow ourselves to cry, both for what we were and for what we are.
Thank you. I appreciate this a lot. Our inherent “skill” for mourning has been lost. My mom is in sever depression because she has t allowed herself to mourn. Those who can mourn “the stranger” maintain emotional health. Thanks again. Dave
We slip the boundary of time when we walk the desert mountains, paddle the waters, visit the special places where early people lived and left their marks. The world of then and now blend and we move through other times into a timelessness. One moment can last forever breathing in the desert view from a high place. I’m sorry for the people rushing by on the highways, going about their restricted daily tasks and never taking time to go the wild places to connect with the timelessness of the land and humanity. It makes us more human.
Beautiful. The words took me back to a time and for a moment it wasn’t very long ago. 🙂
When I was a child in florida, it was legal to just go “play” in the Indian mounds on fallow ground. When I uncovered a jaw bone with a paint brush, i was filled with wonder and anxiety. I didn’t know if it was dog or human. At the time I thought it was dog or a similar creature. But still I wondered. I still wonder about that clueless little girl, who left it alone and didn’t go back there after that.
Escaping our sense of time is an unforgettable entrance into the infinite. After this happens, time is forevermore an illusion.
Time was there yesterday
Will be there tomorrow
Will still be there ticking
When we are all gone
So why do we worry
Why should we be stressed
When there should be none
we basically build our own prison when all our life is focus around time
Beautiful! Really enjoyed reading this.
Some very interesting ideas. I’ve always been fascinated by our relationship with time, and strangely, how that relationship can differ depending on era and culture. We seem to be ruled by clock time in this busy, modern world. It’s interesting that we can break free of that.
Time is an illusion of the physical senses. The closer that we grow to our spirit, which is really us, the more that we realize that we live in eternity.
WOW!! that was AMAZING!! You have got a talent of writing!!
Thank you for your insight. Beautifully written. Only through our concept of time can most people function in this reality. By creating a reality void of time, we can access knowledge, emotion, and information in a constant stream of consciousness.
This is so thoughtful and mirrors many of my own thoughts. I was exposed to very similar history, having lived in Phoenix, AZ for ten years. The narrow constrains of man-made time have since left less and less importance on my mind. Maybe because of my fascination with history I simply don’t have much of a concept of it anymore. History has always seemed like losing yourself to time and feeling like a few thousand years ago really isn’t that far away.
In Sanskrit lamguage which is the oldest written language Ari means enemy.Is it likely that some community had enemity with those who lived in Arizona and they named the region as Arizona? May be,but now all humans are friends and must strive to save the earth
Time untime
Beautifully written to transport the reader through time. I live in the desert Southwest and will make it a point to sometime check out the locale. I have always found more at peace around all things old – people, places, as well as the hearing of the stories of the past. I feel a deeper connection to the past than I do the modern era despite sitting before my laptop. This post will have me pondering for quite some time.
Today my 7th grade reading students watched a film on Pompeii and the Vesuvius volcanic eruption that took place in 79AD. We watched archeologists reconstruct the bodies of people trapped in the lava and ash storm resulting from the eruption. As I read this post tonight, I immediately thought about the emotions I experienced earlier today. As I looked at those bodies in the video, I couldn’t help thinking about those people and their lives “back then”. What they wore, how they lived, their customs, etc. At the end of the day, the mummified silhouettes were once people no different than we are – only separated by time. As I think about this post and my experience today, time did not matter. Only that they were humans that suffered and died due to a natural disaster. I believe it is how we choose to observe time that makes the difference. More importantly, whether or not we place more emphasis on time than people, places, or experiences. Thanks for writing such a thought provoking and stimulating piece.
The story of the young woman and her unborn child made me cry, too. I didn’t even think about when it happened. It is a tragedy to realize that you are giving birth to your child who will probably not be ok. And you feel your own strength leave you. How sad. Then and now, and in the future…
Stopping time is just a matter of living with your heart on your sleeve.
I appreciate the concept, and recognize the limitation of our ability to appreciate time and how it defines us. I’m curious if you have any insight into breaking free? I haven’t found ancient burial grounds nor dug in indian mounds. But I respect that I’m trapped by my construct of time.
You nailed the quote regarding black and white photos and colorless history. If I’m not careful, I start to think the past was simpler place, romanticized to an Eden. Thanks for the post.
Bello
A beautiful, well written and thought provoking piece. I really enjoyed reading it.
Fantastic article, I thoroughly enjoyed it. A great reminder that we’re not isolated in time, and that our connections reach far beyond ourselves and our immediate present.
When I was a small girl, I would sometimes wander the graveyard on beautiful sunny days after Sunday services while my parents were inside having coffee and cake. I was drawn to one headstone time and again whose inscription read, “Where you now stand, I once stood. Where I now lie, you once will too.”
That one inscription helped shape my lifelong sense of time as something precious, fleeting and beautiful.
Thanks for a wonderful post!
Very insightful and beautifully written! I always felt that the past communicates to us through the footprints it left behind. You truly captured the understanding of why we react to footprints that were left long ago for us to discover. In today’s world we can’t always be free of the constraints of time, but when we encounter those moments where the chains of time are shattered, it is truly an awe inspiring experience.
this is nice to read..great job!:)
This is a great topic to have come across, as it is a consistent focal point in how my girlfriend and I view the flow of time. She, in fact, will not wear a watch, as to her it symbolizes being chained to an arbitrarial schedule. We both agree there seems to be limitations on your thoughts, actions and sense of connectivity when one governs all aspects of self with a clock. I very much enjoyed reading this piece.
Time was only invented to separate our lives into little bitty pieces of which most mean very little….the day or night afforded to each of us daily in the very end will not be measured in seconds,minutes, or hours but in measure ments forgotten about long ago….
The concept of time really is encapsulated in the image of an hour glass – it fills up, it runs out, it traps nature in one, thin-layered case of conventionality.
This was a pleasure to read, thank you!
Beautiful
Time is gold they say live your life with no regrets and live your life like you want it to be follow your dreams.
When I was a child, time and time past happened somewhere else, even though I grew up in a place steeped in history (the Boston area.) All the cool archeologocal sites were in Egypt or Greece, Mexico or in the Southwest. We had nothing but historic markers. In fifth grade, the League of Women Voters distributed a booklet called Know Your Town. In it, I discovered that my town dated to the 1600’s, that the ruins of a mill and dam where I played and swam as a very young child were built in that century. My town, which had always existed in my mind just the way I saw it, had a past.
There are places where time is important, where we need time to function. But there are so many more where time should not intervene. On my first river trip through Grand Canyon, we stopped at Deer Creek for the afternoon. Another trip arrived at the same time, day 4 of their 5-7 day trip. We could not tell them what day we were on – it was just another day.
Thanks for writing this, Craig. You’ve made me think a lot about time and where it falls in my life.
An amazing bit of work! ^_^
I love the way you wrote this. I am just finishing up a time travel series. With a major part of it has been placed 3000 years ago in the same region. Your wording adds depth and warmth that helps to see past the veil of time.