Illustration Friday - Reflection

What do you see when you look into your heart? Do you reflect on your life with joy or with regret? Do you see your father or mother, your children, your lovers? Do you see friends you've stood by no matter what, or people you've betrayed? Do you feel satisfied and hopeful for the future, or frustrated and full of dread? Does any of it matter now? What will you do today?

You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in. - Heraclitus


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present...



Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning...



Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

"Burnt Norton" - T.S. Eliot
from Four Quartets