Island time
Marigot Bay, St. Lucia (Photo credit: Yantar Yoga)
As the summer is coming to an end, I savor delightful sunny days and fresh evenings with first hints of the autumn chill. The disruption of our daily lives due to COVID-19 makes it hard to keep track of time, days flow into each other, stretch and contract, months blend imperceptibly. Is it September already? Time can be such an elastic concept…
I am in my back yard but my thoughts travel far and back to the time when we went on vacation to the island of Saint Lucia. I remember our plane approaching to a stunning sight: green, uneven horns of the Pitons rise high above the emerald waters of the Atlantic like two horns of a magical sea creature. Then we drive through the lush heart of the island to Marigot Bay and I have a hard time concentrating on the scenery because it takes all the concentration we can muster to stay on the correct (left) side of the road.
The Caribbean runs on island time. There is a strange feeling of permanent now, perhaps created by the ocean’s all-surrounding presence. Every minute still theoretically lasting 60 seconds but in reality impossible to measure. I swing leisurely in a hammock on the porch of a rustic guest house clinging to the side of the mountain high above the bay, reading the masterpiece by a native son of this island, Derek Walcott’s Omeros:
“For as long as it takes a single drop to dry
on the wax of a dasheen leaf, Philoctete lay
on his pebbled spine on hot earth watching the sky
altering white continents with its geography.
He would ask God’s pardon. Over the quiet bay
the grass smelt good and the clouds changed beautifully.”
Rainbow after rainbow bridges the opposite hill… All these discrete moments melt into one lazily flowing, viscous substance still called time, but having nothing to do with clocks. Life turns into sweet, rich, slowly dripping molasses. All the worries of our daily hassles are so far away, feel like something distant in another lifetime…
Finally a boarding pass delivers painful awakening. A steel bird whisks us away from the island time warp. And now a bite of a hungry DC mosquito awakens me from this day dream. Still in my back yard, still can’t travel far while the pandemic rages, but I have my escape. Yoga Sutra 2:26 says, “The means of attaining cessation is the unceasing vision of discernment.” Enlightenment is a change in perspective. My mind ceases to give into the racing thoughts of the present or anxieties about the future when I choose to live in island time. Time becomes an illusion.