The aspect of the Iowa landscape that impacted me most was light. The winter sun never got high in the sky, long shadows changed direction but never shortened, and I had a feeling of living my whole day in the moment before dusk.
I am interested in time based scale
shifts, or gaining a sense of time travel by expanding my idea of the moment
until it encapsulates all of human history, or all of earth’s history, or the
universe’s. My description of this scale shift is borrowed largely from Brian
Eno and the Long Now Foundation. I could also borrow the words of T.S. Eliot
who spoke of a still point; or Shih-t’ao
who spoke of a wholeness of spirit that goes beyond the intellectual, sensual,
and emotional, “free and unafraid, into
wholeness of universe.”
