The Art Of Creation

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence...

But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to forsee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts, in his 1841 essay, Self-Reliance. There’s a lot of focus on living in the now these days. New age guru’s claim we should only live in the now. They say the past is just a memory, and the future is an expectation. The now is where the spirit meets the flesh. They do have a point. It is the fertile ground of choices, and the rich, and sometimes choking growth of perceptions. We feel our thoughts, and make them real in every moment of the now.

The truth, for most of us, is not in the now. The past holds our truths and dissects them as we wander through the catalogue of our expired experiences. We analyze these past truths, and then mold, rehash and rearrange them so they fit into the present in some way. We call them learning associations or influences that make us what we are. We then put them in our book of beliefs, and we create a life in the present using the lessons we learned from them.

The future is a potential mixture of the past and present. It is a void yet to be filled, but we always try to fill it before it gets here. When it does get here, the future changes names, and becomes the present. The future, like the past was the present at some point in our perception of time. Time tricks us into believing there is the only the now. But the now is more than the now. It is more than the sum of the past and future. The now is a timeless traceless spirit experiencing the richness of feeling the art of creation.