excuse me sir, there's past in this present!

"I can go outside and pick up a rock as old as the oldest song you know and bring it back here and drop it on your foot. The past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here. It's right now..." ~Utah Phillips


We are often told that we need to let the past go and try our best to live in the present moment. I agree with that. We can't allow what happened in the past to stop us from moving forward with our lives; trying something new; being something new.

At the same time, I also agree with what Utah Phillips has to say about the past, "it's right here. it's right now." 

How can it be that we both leave the past behind and simultaneously it's right here and right now.

In following metaphor he offers a concept of the past I hadn't thought of before:

"Time is an enormous long river and I'm standing in it, just as you're standing in it. My elders were the tributaries and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to and every song they created and every poem that they laid down flows down to me. And if I take the time to ask and if I take the time to seek, if I take the time to reach out I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world. Bridges from my time to your time, as my elders from their time to my time. And we will put into the river and we let it go and it flows away from us and away from us 'til it no longer has our name and our identity. It has its own utility; its own use. And people will take what they need and make it part of their lives." ~Utah Phillips

Traditionally we think of time in a linear sense. Linear time moves from point a to point b. The 1980s to the 1990s to the 2000s, etc. In this view of time, I am a point that moves from one moment to the next to the next along a (time)line. 

In Phillips' river analogy, however, I am a stationary point or vertical line, and time is the thing that moves. It is a field that moves through us and around us. 

Can you picture a vast river of all experiences, collective karma as it were, spread out around you, flowing to you, through you, and then from you, on to the next one? 

From our point in the river we have access to all else that has ever been. We only need to "reach out", as he says, for those experiences that are useful to us in our lives. Reusing and renewing them. We give them our own meaning and they become ours (for a time). And what is ours also flows down that vast river, ready to be scooped up by someone standing further downstream.

This image shows me the power of the past that we hold in our hands in this very moment. Our lives are folk songs once sung by our elders, now sung by me (albeit off key), and on to our children.

So let us not deny or forget the past, let us use it as a tool in our present.

Love,
R