Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Location: Unknown

Here we go again, another personal process of battling with time. Time is quite obviously pervasive and in being pervasive it has a tendancy to be inescapable. However, how you choose to react to time is a whole other question. One of my goals of this project was to slow down. To make a feeble attempt at getting outside of the timeframe the operates throughout much of the western world. I can tell you, so far, although I have tried to break free, I have for the most part failed. The western view of time is built into me and everything that I’m trying to accomplish out here on the road. It’s a beautiful ideal to exist out of time, but it’s pretty damn near impossible when the rest of the world, all your human relations still exist according to the clock.

Living with my Blackfoot family for the past six months has definitely taugh me a lot about my relationship to time, and how I’m sucked into rhythms and movements that are a somewhat forced and unnatural construction. I’ve hopped into trucks to go get gas, only to find myself hours later in strange new places taking the time to listen to beautiful stories. My guides have taken me outside the realm of time, but I’m still stuck. I can’t shake the sense of urgency, the sense of having places to go and things to get done. I wish I could feel like an infinite being, but instead I feel surrounded by limitations where if you don’t get it down now, you’ve somehow failed.

This idea of failure is ridiculous since if you even just glace beyond the realm of hours and seconds you quickly come to realize that everything happens in it’s own time. Everything happens in it’s own time, this to say, not according to our attempted control over time.

I’ve seen beyond the hours and seconds, yet am unable to break away from my own self-created time limitations. Consciously I realize that all of this, hurry up, go, go, go, is a total farsical nightmare, and what’s worse is I would argue it’s having a detrimental impact on our environment, our personal well-being, our children, our entire reality.

What’s the point in trying to go so fast? I would say it’s all about competition and ego. Competition not only between human beings trying to out-progress each other, but competition between nations, everyone racing to extract resources before they’re all gone, everyone racing towards weaponization of space, everyone racing towards some unattainable endgame that doesn’t even exist.

I can’t help but think back to the turtle and the hare. I wear a turtle around my neck, a dear friend gave it to me, it’s supposed to be a symbol of longevity. The universe is said to rest on the back of a turtle. These days it reminds me to take it slow, and it carries the lesson that only in taking it slow will longevity be realized.

Still, it’s easier said than done. The pressure of ‘reality’ is oh so powerful. For me it relates to the bigger, yet insignificant picture of me being a filmmaker. I want to succeed and I don’t want people to perceive my process as crazy, although maybe it’s already too late for that. But in any case, in wanting to succeed I’m wanting to conform, and in wanting to conform I’m losing the very essence of what I’m looking for. A separate reality. I’ve had glimpses into this reality so I know it’s there, under the surface, but to get deeper into it I have to continue to let go. As do all of us.

There is another way to live, I just haven’t found it yet. But I will.

peace,
d