Sabbath

I am in Charlotte in a hotel near the University of North Carolina campus.  And, I'm a day early -- having had to be in York  (about forty miles away) for a lunch meeting yesterday.  The annual meeting of the Carolinas Nature Photographers Association doesn't start until this evening.

A whole day.  Concentrated time for quiet thought, long walks, good reading, maybe even a nap.  I'm thinking of today as sabbath.  Here's what Abraham Joshua Heschel has to say on the topic.

Sabbath is an opportunity to mend our tattered lives; to collect rather than to dissipate time.

Isn't that an interesting thought?  Collecting time.  Gathering it, holding it, tending it.  One cannot do that while hurrying, while obsessing over the "to do" list, while fretting over staying on schedule.

This hotel has light fixtures that interest me.  They are spare, plain.  They don't call attention to themselves.  And, their manufacture doesn't seem to have taken an excess of raw material or anything particularly unusual.  The one in the image to the right is in my room.  Its lines please me. 

Were life so straightforward.  More collecting of time seems a must.