The sense of passing time

My thoughts on Holme Beach crystallised in this evening's "Celebration of Passing Time".

We have such a strange attitude towards passing time, growth and ageing.  We celebrate a baby's first word, first tooth, first steps. And yet we have a different attitude to our first gray hair, first wrinkle or the first time we forget where we left the house keys.

It is as if we want everybody in the whole world to be stuck at some "perfect" age. Yet we forget that if we were to continue to celebrate the birth and growth of children, and yet could somehow prevent the downsides of ageing, we would end up with a world with standing room only, populated by immortals with perfect skin.

And so we have celebrated the passing of time this evening. We have poured water into people's hands, to see it dribbling away. We have put "stations" around the Moot House, with egg-timers, hourglasses and countdown timers to reflect the time drifting past. We have ripped the pages from calendars and burnt them in the Beaker Brazier. We have lit tea lights to watch them burn down. We have thrown the rose petals of youth into the Husborne Brook, to watch them float downstream. We have dropped stones in the pond, to see the ripples that never come back.  And we have projected the lifecycle of a flower - a whole season's growth and death of a flower in time-lapse photography - to remember the cycle of life and death, waxing and waning, May to December.

I'm feeling a bit down now, to be honest. I'm off to get my roots done.

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"Ripples" detail from the cover of Genesis "The Trick of the Tail" by Hypgnosis
Animated gif of Moon from Wikimedia Commons by Tomruen