Time for Spirit, time for Harmony

28 August 2019

The time in which heart and mind, free from everyday troubles, come back together in the deepest essence of our being human is time for the Spirit. We can find that time wherever we want it. Like when we leave our workplace in the evening, and when we close the door we also leave behind us what’s necessary in life: that’s time for the spirit.

And if we go home on foot, we might just raise our eyes skywards. Of course, this is more likely to happen if we’re lucky enough to live in the countryside, where everything is gentler, calmer, more peaceful, more profound. And then we’ll see the twinkling lights of the stars, and it will seem as if we understood the silent language of the celestial vault. We will read in it the mystery of time for spirit and that of the universal infinite.

Enraptured by so much beauty, we’ll wish we had a ladder, and an old castle, so we could climb up the highest tower, get a bit closer to the stars, and feel the beauty of the time that in that enchanted place we’ll dedicate to the spirit and its mysterious meaning, spending hours regenerating and reflecting in solitude.

Time transforms things, just as in dreams, and there is no apparent reason to it. How beautiful are all those things that can be understood without needing to be explained by reason! When we take time for the spirit, we see new, profound things, and old things from a new perspective: where once we felt sorrow, we now have a glimpse of hope, and the things that appeared to be mud shine like diamonds under the moon.

Goethe once said, “Beautiful moment, do not pass away!” And Plato talked with his disciples of his idea of eternity, the sum of all our past, all our present, and all our future. The past, kingdom of memory; the future, kingdom of the imagination; and the present, so elusive in its flow, just like that river in which, as Heraclitus thought, we never step twice, because like the water, we, too, are constantly flowing.

When we were children, what was time to us? But our elders know time; they’re acquainted with its length, and at times they fear it. But no: when we take time for the spirit, it becomes a wellspring of life. Old age brings pain to many, but actually it feeds the spirit with memory and with the joy of getting closer and closer to the stars each day. This is the wonder of life, in which the body first grows and at a certain point begins to decline, but the Spirit flies ever higher.