...

"When you allow yourself to pause for a moment - in that uncomfortable feeling of boredom, almost like tasting it - something happens, something new opens up, something new is created. That is where creativity lives, if anywhere - in the midst of boredom and the ordinary."

Sanna Vaara

How to Celebrate a Quiet Life - Daily Life in Finland

like the Aurignacian hunter

In his first summer, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for near an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying, birdsong and sweet smell of privet and rose. The child was not observing; he was at rest in the very centre of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginnings, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.

Ecstasy is identity with all existence, and ecstacy showed in his bright paintings; like the Aurignacian hunter, who became the deer he drew on the cave wall, there was no "self" to separate him from the bird or flower. The same spontaneous identity with the object is achieved in the bold sumi paintings of Japan -- a strong expression of Zen culture, since to become one with whatever one does is a true realization of the Way.

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (1979), p47 (Harvill HarperCollins 1989)

Klang der Sprache

Das Französische klingt weich und sanft wie im Traum geflüstert. Das Sprechen verläuft ohne Pause und Hänger, und die Französisch Sprechenden geraten, je länger sie sprechen, immer tiefer hinein in den Traum. Im Traum ist es aber nicht dunkel oder gefährlich, sondern hell, wie im Frühling oder im Herbst, keineswegs aber wie im Sommer oder im Winter.   

Ortheil, Die Berlinreise, p 103 (Luchterhand 2014)

'that distant, watery past'

We just want to go back. To the distant, distant past. To a primeval era, in fact, before human beings existed. All people with autism feel the same about this one, I reckon. Aquatic life-forms came into being and evolved, but why did they then have to emerge onto dry land, and turn into human beings who chose to lead lives ruled by time? These are real mysteries to me.

In the water it's so quiet and I'm so free and happy there. Nobody hassles us in the water, and it's as if we've got all the time in the world. Whether we stay in one place or whether we're swimming about, when we're in the water we can really be at one with the pulse of time. Outside of the water there's always too much stimulation for our eyes and our ears, and it's impossible for us to guess how long one second is or how long an hour takes.

People with autism have no freedom. The reason is that we are a different kind of human, born with primeval senses. We are outside the normal flow of time, we can't express ourselves, and our bodies are hurtling us through life. If only we could go back to that distant, distant, watery past - then we'd all be able to live as contentedly and as freely as you lot!
Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism, Q39 p104-105 (Sceptre 2014), translated by David Mitchell & Keiko Yoshida

Zeit?

Die Zeit verwandelt uns nicht.
Sie entfaltet uns nur.
Indem man es nicht verschweigt, sondern aufschreibt, bekennt man sich zu seinem Denken, das bestenfalls für den Augenblick und für den Standort stimmt, da es sich erzeugt. Man rechnet nicht mit der Hoffnung, dass man übermorgen, wenn man das Gegenteil denkt, klüger sei. Man ist, was man ist. Man hält die Feder hin, wie eine Nadel in der Erdbebenwarte, und eigentlich sind nicht wir es, die schreiben; sondern wir werden geschrieben. [...]

Die Zeit?
Sie wäre damit nur ein Zaubermittel, das unser Wesen auseinander zieht und sichtbar macht, indem sie das Leben, das eine Allgegenwart alles Möglichen ist, in ein Nacheinander zerlegt; allein dadurch erscheint es als Verwandlung, und darum drängt es uns immer wieder zur Vermutung, dass die Zeit, das Nacheinander, nicht wesentlich ist, sondern scheinbar, ein Hilfsmittel unsrer Vorstellung, eine Abwicklung, die uns nacheinander zeigt, was eigentlich ein Ineinander ist, ein Zugleich, das wir allerdings als solches nicht wahrnehmen können, so wenig wie die Farben des Lichtes, wenn sein Strahl nicht gebrochen und zerlegt ist.
Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946 - 1949, p18​ (Suhrkamp Verlag)
English translation

time

Time does not change us.
It just unfolds us.
By not suppressing them, but writing them down, one acknowledges one's thoughts, which belong at best only to the moment and the place that produce them. One has no hope that two days hence, when one thinks the opposite, one will be wiser. One is what one is. One uses one's pen like the needle of a seismograph: we do not so much write as get a written. [...]

And time?
It would according to this be simply a magic device which separates out our nature and makes it visible by laying out life, an omnipresence of all possibilities, as a series. That alone is what makes it seem transitory, and that is why we always tend to suppose that time, the one-thing-after-another, is not actual, but apparent: it is an aid to visualization, a means of showing us one after another things that are in fact interlocked, forming a whole which we can no more grasp than we can see the separate colors that constitute light, until its rays are broken down and dissected.
Sketchbook 1946 - 1949, p12/13 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
translated by Geoffrey Skelton 
Link to original text in German

butterflies

When we have done all the work we were sent to Earth to do, we are allowed to shed our body, which imprisons our soul like a cocoon encloses the future butterfly.
And when the time is right, we can let go of it and we will be free of pain, free of fears and worries - free as a very beautiful butterfly, returning home to God...

from a letter to a child with cancer
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, The Wheel Of Life, p7 (Bantam Books 1998)

in German:
Wenn wir die Prüfungen, die uns auf der Erde aufgegeben waren bestanden haben, dürfen wir den Abschluss machen. Wir dürfen unseren Körper ablegen, der unsere Seele gefangenhält, wie ein Kokon den Schmetterling einschliesst; und wenn die Zeit reif ist, können wir ihn loslassen. Dann werden wir frei sein von Schmerz, frei von Angst und frei von Kummer... frei wie ein schöner Schmetterling, der zu Gott heimkehrt...zu einem Ort, wo wir niemals einsam sind, an dem wir weiter wachsen und singen und tanzen, an dem wir mit unseren Lieben zusammen sind und von mehr Liebe umgeben werden, als wir uns vorstellen können.