I have crashed again into a depression. I went for a run and gave up three-quarters of the way around. When I got home I saw a spatter of feathers, the remainder of a sparrowhawk kill and I couldn't see Tane. I thought the feeling weighing me down was a premonition. A knowing of his killing. But then, I saw a robin high up, I whistled, and Tane came. Relief. Yet the darkness remained. The sky, which had been heavy and grey when I went running, had cleared and was azure. Beautiful. But my mood did not track the weather. Then I went for my verruca treatment and it took an hour for the anaesthetic to start to work. Even then, I needed an extra show and I screamed as the needle went in. The procedure is done and my foot is sore. I came home and wept. There is nothing to weep for. But, like beauty, grief too ingresses the temporal with a sense of the eternal.
That idea comes from the book I am reading. It is wonderful... as you can tell from the quotation after this image.
Eternity is a present quality, a dimension and a glory of being that now is, of this evening. The sense of this evening is not a function of a temporal reference. When, fascinated with time, we teach ourselves to think of the evening as a transition, as the conclusion of the day and the anticipation of the night, something to pass through in order to get from the former to the latter, we lose the evening itself. So, too, we lose a journey when we think of it as something to be endured in the transition between here and elsewhere, and the days of our lives when we think of them as time not to be cherished but to be endured from x until y. Instrumental value—though indubitably real enough—then overshadows intrinsic value, robbing our lives of the profound worth present in them in exchange for the ephemeral promise of value to come, giving rise to the illusion of a “value-free” reality. To recover the truth of value it is crucial to bracket the reductive framework of temporal sequence and to see being in its reference to the eternity which ever intersects with time, defining the now within it. Within time, that now would be indistinguishable from the endless series of such nows. It stands out as the moment in which eternity intersects time. - Erazim Kohák
You: "like beauty, grief too ingresses the temporal with a sense of the eternal" - that's beautifully said. And Erazim writes about the intersection of eternity with moments/nows of time. That's probably from his "The Embers and the Stars". ... I hope you and your foot are feeling better xx