Only One, Only Now

My daughter and her boyfriend spent their previous school year in Taiwan, studying Mandarin, and we had visited them over Christmas (can that be only a year ago?). So yesterday I invited Martin, who is staying with us this week, to browse among my photos from that trip.

Which means that when I opened my PhotoShop browser this morning, the Taiwan photos all reappeared on my screen. This one, of the Taipei MRT, really called out to me: is it because the perspective has such a strong pull?

There is a curious rushing feeling to this image which feels very harried, bringing back the tension of working in an urban environment, always in a hurry, always pushing toward the next new thing. And yet, at the same time, it's reminiscent of that sort of downward slope, the bottomless plummet to the center you can get sometimes in meditation.

How is it that both these feelings, so opposite one another, can exist in the same image; that we can be propelled both away from self and into deepest self at the same time? Perhaps it is because the rush of time, like the boundary between self and other, is simply an illusion... There is only Now, which somehow includes where we've been and where we're going; there is only One, which somehow includes me with my camera, the woman whose shoes and skirt are reflected in the glass barrier, the people behind me, and the people on the train that's speeding out of the station.

Only One.
Only Now.