Time Travel

Last week while in Spain, we visited art museums, a palace, churches, narrow winding streets cacophonous with vendors. Street performers were everywhere, the level of talent variable, the passion evident. From watching pilot whales in the Straights of Gibraltar, to stumbling across a heroin addict needle in arm sitting on an ancient wall in Tangier, the images tangle, weave and inspire. Oh Life!
There was one moment, though, where I felt my spirit still and find a center in all of this movement, color, story and energy. As if a calm voice were caressing me, I heard the message within to take back home with me, take forward—that life moves on, ever on.
Being surrounded by city walls, some nearly 1,100 years old—yet still standing and useful—there is an innate sense of timelessness and a sense of time moving forward and back again upon itself. As tragic as life can get, even the walls that fall down can be rebuilt, re-imagined. Madrid, Morocco, ancient places remind us of the fluidity of time and story. Past life beliefs become visceral. And there is a reassurance that worries possessed today will shift and change a hundred times, a million. It becomes easier to release worry when there is that kind of assurance that as is recorded in Hebrew, “Gam zeh ya’avor”, “this too shall pass.”
Our hotel in Madrid was ultra modern—the walls a soothing gray, the stereo/radio on the wall requiring password and a tutorial. Across the street on the top of the building were statues of soldiers and horses. We did the Sofia Raina museum one morning and the Prado Museum in the afternoon—modern art and the old masters.
The structure of time itself shifted with day light savings occurring in Spain on Sunday. That morning we caught a ferry from Tarifa to Tangiers in Morocco. Morocco did not spring forward one hour, which ended up translating to our traveling 8 kilometers across the Straights of Gibraltar and losing two hours. The rest of the day, we were clueless as to the time. Our guide, Sayeed, explained that in Morocco time is unimportant. He told us about a square in Casablanca with a clock tower in each corner and typically, all four display different times.
That seems the perfect metaphor for how past lives work, not linear and tidy, but oddly simultaneous, multidimensional, concurrent.
I’m glad to be home, although I could have stayed longer. Our daughter’s friend, Alex, took us to a spot in Madrid said to be the very center of the city in a popular square called Puerta Del Sol (Port of the Sun). He told us legend has it if you stand on that spot and turn three times, you are destined to return to Spain, adding that he did it on his first visit and it worked for him. Love testimonials! We each spun round three time, all hoping to find ourselves back in that beautiful city again someday. I can’t help but wonder, though, if we have simply fulfilled the promise of that legend from some other life when we twirled around the sun.