Читать книгу Off On Our Own - Ted Carns - Страница 15

Now that we have email, a cell phone and the fact you’re reading this book, we might have to change the open door policy a bit. If interest should happen to surge we may have to start scheduling some things so we can have our share of quiet time and still be welcoming hosts. I have noticed a decline in the drop by’s, but I don’t think it’s because we’re losing friends.

I think it’s what the Hopi elders predicted of the last days. They said we’re going to see two distinct and profound changes. Change #1 is that it’s going to get really hot, and #2 is that time will accelerate. It will be like “Oh my God, it’s Friday again!” That happens when you get older, but the elders said this will be different – everybody will experience it.

I wondered and pondered just how that could happen. Then I realized, yes, time really is relative just as Einstein said, and we each can choose between two distinct approaches to time. We can either be obsessed with efficiency and saving time, or . . . we can kick back, relax and take time, or just simply make time. Time doesn’t expand in the obsession to save it – it does the opposite: It shrinks. Time may be money, but money has wings, and like time it flies away as fast as it can. Life is where time is. Its fullness is in taking time and making time. Life actually disappears when all you want to do is strive for quickness and efficiency. Saving time may actually be even killing time. How ironic can you get? The effort to save it makes you lose it. Time-saving efficiency gets you to your destination quicker, but that’s what makes time accelerate.

On reflection, I can remember sitting with artists, actors, actresses, activists, acupuncturists, anarchists, autistic children, professional athletes and total assholes; Ayurvedic, homeopathic and naturopathic healers, chiropractors, surgeons, pediatricians, dentists and general practitioners. I’ve spoken with victims of cancer and HIV who were in their last days among the living.

I’ve been woken up at 3 am to be told, “I spent all my children’s college savings on cocaine. What the hell am I going to do?” I’ve chatted with psychiatrists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers; child therapists and social workers; teachers, lawyers, outlaws, juvenile delinquents and law enforcement officers; musicians, poets and an opera singer who sang for the Pope; Catholic priests, Zen Buddhist priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses and preachers of most every Christian faith, members of every race, creed and religion, and a man who knew Al Capone when he was a kid.

I’ve had coffee with saintly persons and embodiments of apparent evil, and sometimes both at once. I saw a guy who was an undercover narcotic agent for 25 years sit with a confessed heavy bud smoker like best friends. I remember the narc said something like, “Nobody’s on duty up here.” I’ve sat with servants, masters, seekers of Truth and compulsive liars. Visitors from all over the world have walked through The Stone Camp’s unlocked doors. And I still don’t know how most of them even found the place.