Laurie Anderson: About Time with Jane Hirschfield

Tim McHenry:

Do you feel like you’re running out of time? Are you able to stop time? If so, how? Welcome to about time, an audio series from the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art that aims to reframe the concept of time and perhaps our perspective on life. I’m your host, Tim McHenry. Many objects in the Rubin’s collection of Himalayan art reflect the Buddhist concept of the present, highlighting the illusionary nature of the past and future. In this four part series, performance artist, electronic music pioneer, filmmaker, and all around creative genius Laurie Anderson curated a series of conversations to tackle questions about time. Laurie’s guests were poet Jane Hirschfield, novelist Tom McCarthy, philosopher the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, and writer Benjamín Labatut. This is a recording of a 2024 in-person program, one of many organized and hosted by me at the Rubin. 

Laurie’s guest in this episode is poet Jane Hirschfield, who is also a lay ordained practitioner of Soto Zen In her poems—and we will hear her recite four of them—she displays that exquisite ability to observe the monumentality of existence in the smallest facets of nature. Are we running out of time? That has become an existential question, which in this wide ranging exploration, Lori and Jane do not shy away from.

Laurie Anderson:

I just discovered that I was born in the same city in the same month, the same year—Chicago June 1947—as the beginning of the Doomsday Clock was set in motion. So the clock that’s going sometimes backwards, sometimes forward, sometimes just wobbling like this, but it is something that’s pointing towards midnight. So Jane has written some incredibly beautiful poems about those, but I wanted to see if you would start with a really short, beautiful one called A Day Is Vast, but maybe you’d like to say a little bit about that one before you read it.

Jane Hirschfield:

Yeah. Well I’m going to say something about time before I read it, which is first of all, given that I now know that you and the Doomsday Clock are twins, I wish you immortality. I thought speed and terror, which were Laurie’s guiding lights, are brilliant relationships to how life so often does feel. Now, one of the ways I was thinking about time as I was trying to prepare for this was thinking about most of our experience of time is subjective. It is how we feel it in our own lives, in our own days. If something is subjective, then in theory at least something must be objective. And I was very relieved when I realized I don’t have to swat up the physics of time, but when I did glance at the physics of time, what I found was every physicist who was asked to define time answers by saying “I really can’t.”

But it’s the space that change happens in and that’s how we know time, which in a way is a quite subjective relationship to it. So here is my little poem having to do with the speed part of how everyone I know just feels like there are no longer the hours in the day that there once were. So the poem is called A Day Is Vast: 

A day is vast until noon, then it’s over. 

Yesterday’s pond water braided still wet in my hair. 

I don’t know what time is, you can’t ever find it, but you can lose it.

Laurie Anderson:

One of the great things about reading your poems is that you suddenly see things from your poems. And when you mentioned pond, I walked into a kind of sunlit room yesterday and my little dog, little Will was curled in a little ball in some light and it was immediately aligned from one of your poems. A dog sized pond of light—time is long, it’s short, it’s big.

Jane Hirschfield:

Well, language is so interesting because we’re trying to talk about things that exist without words. And so almost all of it to say that a day is long or short or heavy or light, it’s all a kind of the metaphorical understanding which comes to us because we are embodied beings and the only way we can ever enter and understand the world is because we are creatures of the senses. And so we translate everything, language itself translates everything back into the senses. And I was thinking about, well, what is my epistemology of time? And I realized, well, my epistemology of time is I am a mammal on earth and that’s the only way I can know it. I can’t know the time that might run forwards and backwards in the quantum realms. I can only know my human embodied time in which hair changes color and bodies change shape.

So I had for many years, four times through two publishers, I had turned down the idea of doing a selected poems. I just thought, not necessary. The earlier books are in print and I always said, oh, it feels premature. And then my Knopf editor sent me an email and said “Jane, you’re turning 70 in 2023. Don’t you think you should do your…” and I’d lost my excuse about you can’t say it’s premature when you’re 70. And so with great reluctance I agreed and said, okay, and then the personal autobiographical, retrospective time of putting together a book with 50 years of your own poems in them. The earliest poem in here is from 1971 when I was still in college, and the most recent was probably written in 2022, I would guess. And so I am not by nature that retrospective a person. I’m sure everybody’s sense of time is mediated by the qualities of your memory.

And I, from childhood have had a disastrously poor memory. And so it’s hard to be retrospective if you don’t remember anything. But somehow doing a book with 50 years of my poems in them and they were written down and I do recall what events in the life precipitated each and every one of them. It was absolutely shocking to me because suddenly, especially…they had me do an audio book of it, which meant I sat in a studio in San Rafael, California, called Laughing Tiger Studio and read 50 years of my own work over a day and a half. And I had not expected to be either surprised or undone. And I was both because I was seeing connections that were there to be seen, but I’d never made them. How one poem written 40 years ago was talking to a poem written four years ago.

Also some of the poems when I wrote them, I didn’t know how things would come out, and now I do. And that was odd. It was a shockingly emotional experience. If I’d been by myself, I might’ve stopped and broken down, but I was in a studio, I had to keep speaking and not… it’s very bad form to cry at your own poems. So I didn’t. But it has happened once or twice in my life where reading somebody else’s poem after they’ve died when I’ve been shocked and just totally started weeping. 

My Life Was the Size of My Life:

My life was the size of my life.

Its rooms were room-sized,

its soul was the size of a soul.

In its background, mitochondria hummed,

above it sun, clouds, snow,

the transit of stars and planets.

It rode elevators, bullet trains,

various airplanes, a donkey.

It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.

It ate, it slept, it opened

and closed its hands, its windows.

Others, I know, had lives larger.

Others, I know, had lives shorter.

The depth of lives, too, is different.

There were times my life and I made jokes together.

There were times we made bread.

Once, I grew moody and distant.

I told my life I would like some time,

I would like to try seeing others.

In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.

I was hungry, then, and my life,

my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep

our hands off our clothes on   

our tongues from

Laurie Anderson:

You remember writing those poems, don’t you? The ones in the books?

Jane Hirschfield:

Oh yes.

Laurie Anderson:

So you have a very good memory. Really? No, they’re in print. Oh, okay. They remember you remember themselves. Remember without that prompt of the print.

Jane Hirschfield:

Probably not really, no. Oh, that’s magic then. Yeah, print is a magic technology. I’m very grateful for it. It augments memory something grand.

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah. Well I think also one of the things that I find fascinating that what you’re doing too is the tiny little tense twists that you use that make you kind of go forward and back and not sure whether you’re remembering it or predicting it or just experiencing or all of those at once because that’s more usually the experience. And I’m just thinking of one little shift of a friend of mine who says that she likes to do an exercise when she’s driving of shifting “the” to “a”, and I really appreciate this exercise. She said if you’re driving and you say you’re driving down the road, if you shift “the” to I’m driving down “a” road, it’s an utterly different experience because if you’re driving down the road, you’re driving down the road to your job, the job you have as if you’re driving down a road, you see it suddenly like it’s like a road. And this really stuck out for me in one of your poems. So the way clay and wheel turn the hands of the potter into the hands of a potter, and that’s a different tweak on it, but these tiny little things that you think are the gear shifts in a sentence that make it something utterly else.

Jane Hirschfield:

It’s sort of like the precision that’s required, as I’ve heard, of diamond cutters, if you don’t get the angle precisely right, the diamond will go to sleep and it won’t refract light in the same way. Its capacity to throw light will be diminished if you don’t get the right angle.

Laurie Anderson:

You’ve written so many beautiful things about animals and I want to get to talk about that in a more general way. But do you think they experience time in different ways? I mean you’re also involved in neuroscience. Is that something that you’re interested in finding out or just is it just like no idea.

Jane Hirschfield:

So I’m interested in intuiting about it. I don’t have the skills to run the studies and I think we are probably almost certainly on a great continuum with the animals. And so the sense of time which we might come back to of a snail is probably different than the sense of time of one of our dogs or cats or certainly the, now we know brilliant birds, birds have enormous intelligence. But I do suspect it is different. And if I had to guess at what might be distinctively human having to do with our opposable thumbs and our experimental language abilities, I suspect our animals probably aren’t engaging in prospective time. I don’t think many of them are thinking, boy, when she comes home, am I going to give it to her? I had a border collie who was the dog love of my life and she was always in the present moment.

She was a great Buddhist teacher for me because she lived so entirely in the present and brought, because she was the kind of border collie that she was, my great luck. She brought joy to every step and breath of her life. And part of that… Oliver Sacks wrote essays a long time ago about somebody who lost their sense of the future and somebody who lost their sense of the past. And if you lose your sense of the future as human beings, because we were terribly anxious mammals, people get really happy. And when they lost the past they would get uneasy as if they knew something was missing but it was truly missing. The future is such a fantastically mixed important element that we somehow, even though we must be creatures of the present because that’s the only place we live, but that we can throw our minds into the future, it gives us both terror and hope. These are emotions of time. They are not the emotions of this moment. They’re the emotions of this moment being felt in the light of a different time zone.

Laurie Anderson:

I’m just thinking of one poem where you’re going both ways into the future and past with Let Them Not Say.

Jane Hirschfield:

So. This is a poem I wrote in 2014 entirely thinking of the crisis of the biosphere. I tend to say crisis of the biosphere rather than climate change because we do have more than one crisis. We have the crisis of climate, we also have the crisis of toxins. We have the crisis of extinctions caused because we keep building over habitats. So there are many crises of which climate is certainly the forefront one that we are trying right now to grapple with. But I wrote the poem and even though I had written a poem called Global Warming in 2004 and had been aware of all these issues since 1970 when I was at the first Earth Day, something changed in 2014. And when I wrote this poem, it then changed me because the urgency went to a different level. And the poem is looking from the point of view of the future at what we are doing now and trying to inhabit 50 years from now, if there are people to see, they will know whether we did all right or not in this current decade, 15 years, whatever, we might have to move the great ship tiller to a different direction. And that time sense I think is part of why art allows us to inhabit all the time zones and relationships at once. So I’m sitting in the present imagining the future and thinking that the future is going to judge us. Now in this poem, writing a poem whose greatest wish is to make itself 50 years from now meaningless. If the poem works, people will laugh and say, why was she so worried? Silly person, it all was fine. But we don’t know that now. So here’s the poem:

Let them not say: we did not see it.

We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.

We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.

We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,

we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.

We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.

It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,

read by its light, praised,

and it burned.

And here we are under electric lights. Glad to be together. We must feel great compassion for mammals who want to be warm, who want to see when it is dark. I am a participant in this, I actually did live by kerosene lamp for three years in a monastery in the wilderness of California, Tasara. I have burned my own share of carbon emissions and more. But after writing this poem, I had to live up to it and I became a person who started taking some action every single day. It could be a small action, it could be a totally useless action, but something every day. And this is the antidote to despair, to whether or not you saved the ant. You are a different human being if you carry it outside than if you squash it. Now, if you’ve got a huge ant invasion in your kitchen, I do understand, but, and we can think our way through these ethical and moral perplexities and dilemmas because we think with our hands held by time, because I remember in 1973 when I drove cross country living in a red dodge van with tie dyed curtains I could drink out of every creek I passed, I could drink those waters safely.

And now if I go into the back country, the deepest back country that I can get to, I carry a filter.

Laurie Anderson:

Were you doing macrame?

Jane Hirschfield:

What’s that?

Laurie Anderson:

Were you doing macrame?

Jane Hirschfield:

I never did macrame. Not very handy, but I have become a sourdough bread baker to my huge endless delight. There’s magic in the air yeast, they make bread out of nothing with time. That’s the thing about sourdough bread. It takes more time.

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah, I mean Let Them Not Say is really an intense poem. But one of the things I really love about your poem so much is that you can be extremely dark and much more so than this one. And I wish you would read because it’s one thing to kind of go, oh, we see how bad it is, but we’re able to do something. This one takes you to another place. It’s a very, very beautiful poem in the way that thinks that you suddenly realize, oh, that’s quite true, can be horrible and a great relief to hear someone speaking that way. And it’s written in… 

Jane Hirschfield:

The ghazal form is a Persian urdu form of long lined couplets, which if done strictly has a particular syllable count and metrics to it and the rhyme words in a correct ghazal, you repeat the same word at the end of every couplet, every two lines. Mine is an American relaxed ghazal. So the sound which comes in the first two lines is open, but open ends up rhyming with things like abandoned and instruction as the poem goes on. So it’s setting a sound and then it’s alluding to it without necessarily keeping it proper. The title, the full title of the poem is after Messiaen’s piece, Quartet for the End of Time. And he wrote that when he was a prisoner of war in the Second World War and forced to make music for him, he said his music, which I find very beautiful, but also absolutely undoingly full of grief.

He said it was a celebration of the Catholic radiance of God’s existence. That’s not how I hear the piece myself. And it’s nothing to do with, as Lauriei said, it’s the darkest poem I’ve ever written. It terrified me and still does. It’s so dark. So it’s a page. So Ghazal for the End of Time:

Break anything—a window, a pie crust, a glacier—it will break

open.

A voice cannot speak, cannot sing, without lips, teeth, lamina

propria coming open.

Some breakage can barely be named, hardly be spoken.

Rains stopped, roof said. Fires, forests, cities, cellars peeled open.

Tears stopped, eyes said. An unhearable music fell instead from

them.

A clarinet stripped of its breathing, the cello abandoned.

The violin grieving, a hand too long empty held open.

The imperial piano, its 89th, 90th, 91st strings unsummoned,

unwoken.

Watching, listening, was like that: the low, wordless humming of

being unwoven.

Fish vanished. Bees vanished. Bats whitened. Arctic ice opened.

Hands wanted more time, hands thought we had time. Spending

time’s rivers,

its meadows, its mountains, its instruments tuning their silence, its

deep mantle broken.

Earth stumbled within and outside us.

Orca, thistle, kestrel withheld their instruction.

Rock said, Burning Ones, pry your own blindness open.

Death said, Now I too am orphan.

And I know that even if we humans ruin the world for ourselves, all biological life will not end. Cockroaches are really sturdy. But the thought of a world in If Death Is an Orphan, it means there is no life. And that is the darkest thought I have ever found arise in me.

Laurie Anderson:

When we were talking about different ways of seeing time. I mean for this one I see you using in some way an image of a road and maybe road in, what is his name?

Jane Hirschfield:

Oh yes, Cormac McCarthy

Laurie Anderson:

Cormac McCarthy, desolate road to death, nothingness. When I read that or hear you read it, I think of other images other than a road. I mean time, usually it’s always some kind of a stream or road or river or this kind of thing. The only way I can tolerate hearing poems like that or hearing people talk about things like that is to stop time myself. I did ask one teacher that I had about what happens to the big wheel of karma when all life stops on earth? How does that continue? How do people go into other lives? And he had an answer like he said, oh, well yes. My answer to that is that’s why the Buddha talked about other universes. I was like, oh, that’s not an answer. We live here. We live here and we have a certain kind of responsibilities that you talk so beautifully about your poems.

Jane Hirschfield:

Buddhism, like every other great system of thought has 10,000 varieties to it. And so Laurie had brought up karma and I immediately thought of kalpas because we think alliteratively and a k summons a k. But then I also thought for me as a Zen practitioner and as a human being who has led the life that I have led, the moments of my life which are the most meaningful to me are moments when I have not inhabited them and time has not inhabited them. It is the great when self and other, when duality falls away and those moments that probably everyone in this room has had either as a five-year-old or as a teenager listening to a piece of music when you disappeared into the music or as a practitioner. And this isn’t just Buddhism, all the Western mystics as well have this experience of the falling away of self and other and personal and everything. That’s the other antidote to despair. So the two antidotes for our terror and our speed for that matter, because when time stops, you’re not going fast, you’re not going slow, you’re not going…

Laurie Anderson:

No road.

Jane Hirschfield:

It just is. And we who are alive in these very brief, perishable human bodies, we get to perceive it. And those moments of pure perception when there is no self and there is no difference between the bird singing and everything that your own life is, that is such a, they end. And one of the baffling things is that time goes away and you think, how could I ever not feel this way again? And three weeks later you’re sort of mostly back to normal, but it recalibrates your perspective and it brings not only the memory that we in our own particular lives, who have all the responsibility that we actually do. We do have it, but we’re not the center of the universe. I have become more and more, and I don’t know that this has much to do with time, but more and more I feel like one of the great saving graces is humility. Because arrogance says the world is mine to fix and I might fail. And humility is the great not knowing of, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next day or who will do what. And I think we need both of these as we navigate speed and terror. It is your responsibility to get to the airport that you’re supposed to be at not very long from now, but you didn’t build the plane. And what will keep it, aloft is out of our control. It’s like.. I love feeling small. I really love feeling small. 

Laurie Anderson:

Yeah, I think more than small, I think I like feeling that I’m somebody else. I mean first of all, I do like stopping time and being no one. That to me is my goal. But I also like these feelings of jumping out into somebody else’s being and feeling a human connection to other people. I would describe it as a network and I’m just thinking of some of Leonard Cohen’s writing in that way. And I have that one little thing about hearts because he has one little couplet at the end of one of his songs and he goes, and here’s the night the night has begun, and here is your death in the heart of your son, and here’s the dawn til death to his part, and here is your death in your daughter’s heart. So we are so connected with the delight of stopping time and all of this other stuff. There’s also that jumping out and it is a relief to jump out. I have a friend who’s disturbed about how old he’s getting and he looks in the mirror and he goes, not bad but not me. So you can associate and just kind of have fun and float around and not be in the trap that you’ve made yourself. And I think that’s part of the great fun of making things is to get out of that little narrow thing that you’ve made that supposedly defines you and who you are. And you have to stay in that because people go, you’re just not yourself. What’s wrong with you? People want you somehow to have some continuity.

Jane Hirschfield:

What I love about the Leonard Cohen and what you just said is it’s acknowledging something that maybe I hope it’s been present in everything we’ve done, but maybe it wants to be named, which is the sense of kinship and connection with all beings. And that also is one of our great Buddhist compassion and the simple sense that who you think of as your kin, it’s endless. Our family doesn’t end with the 23andMe ancestry chart. Our family is all of it. Everyone, because our imagination goes into a cloud in the mountain and a tree and the termite. And when you put a termite in a poem, you have to be a termite for a second to write it and you have to be a termite for a second to read it. And you just get this sense of we’re all going forward together. And that also is a wonderful recalibration of some of our less attractive human tendencies that are in us all. But I just feel more and more this sense of sister, brother, uncle, aunt addressing everything that exit sign, cousin, exit, death.

Laurie Anderson:

You only feel that in your work. It definitely is that although I don’t feel the image of moving forward with other people, I feel that it’s not going anywhere, which to me is a great relief because I don’t feel necessarily that we are going to some great whatever place or bad whatever place, that it’s a bit of an illusion and pulls my attention away from other things.

Jane Hirschfield:

So I am going to break form because it’s very hard to speak about those experiences which exist in the realm of the wordless. And so I’m going to give you a poem that is the only time in a poem I have ever tried to bring those experiences into words, especially in Soto Zen. It’s very bad form to even admit that you’ve ever had such an experience. It’s just you don’t, Rinzai people, they announce it at the end of the sessions. And Soto people, it’s like me, I’ve never had any. No, I wash dishes and that’s more than enough and it really is. And it really is much more the measure of things than whether something has ever happened. But anyhow, not too long a poem talking both about those experiences and also talking about what I mentioned earlier, that there is some residue. Three Times My Life Has Opened:

Three times my life has opened.

Once, into darkness and rain.

Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and

starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.

Once, to the fire that holds all.

These three were not different.

You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped

from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping

the colored silks.

Neither are we different in what we know.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of

light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,

or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

You want to say anything about it?

Laurie Anderson:

Well, I just saw a tree that was in the middle of releasing all its leaves and it was so, I’d never seen that before. I’ve seen them down there and I’ve seen them up there, but it just was a windy day and it was all the trees were releasing their red leaves. It was a really awesome thing to see.

Jane Hirschfield:

And we can do that rarely in our own. It’s like we release all of our leaves and there you are for that moment and the sun and the wind are like on your bark.

Laurie Anderson:

That reminds you of a story I told you earlier today. A friend of mine had an oak tree in the front yard and they had to cut it down and it was really old and rotting. And so they started from the top and they found out it was a huge nest and it was an eagle’s nest and no one had even seen the eagle coming and going and all of us, but they realized he’d been living in there for many years. Inside the nest were about 30 dog collars. What happened to Fluffy? Now we know. Anyway, I guess just an empty tree was just reminding me of that. No, when I read your poems, it just becomes a cascade of imagery. They’re so clear and they’re so vivid and it just makes me see things differently. It makes me want to run out.

That same thing happens to me with music. If I hear something really, really good, I am the person who needs to get out of my seat. Excuse me, excuse me. I have to for some reason run out into the street really fast, almost desperately just kind of to see if it’s true out there somehow. And it’s really rude. And I know if people who know me who’ve just done a concert and I’m in the green room and they know I didn’t really like to show that much, they didn’t have to run outside and test it out on the street. When work affects your life like that, it’s such a miracle. And I feel that way about your poems. They’re so alive, they’re so really alive.

Jane Hirschfield:

Sometime in the last year I had, it wasn’t quite one of those experiences of everything falling away, but I’d been listening to some podcast about deep time and they were talking about this sense of process and somehow four, seven, I was doing my end of day exercise trot. So I was trotting along and for five or six minutes I felt the world as verb and not as objects. And it was wonderful. But it’s very hard because we are so, our brains are shaped by the languages and the descriptions that are given to us by the cultures we’re born into. And so it’s hard to break from those habits and feel yourself and everything as active. And yet what is Buddhism? Everything changes. One of the great teachings of Buddhism is that we are nothing but change at every moment. And yet to feel that into your bone marrow. And of course that’s what your bone marrow is doing. It’s busy discarding this and making new blood cells and everything is changing all the time. And yet our rational minds try to put black lines around them like that school of French painting that I can’t remember the name of, and it’s not black lines at all. It’s just endless flux. And what a relief to feel that what a joy to feel that.

Laurie Anderson:

Your description of the walk was just reminding me these other two lines of things are flowing by and now is becoming then. And it’s just two lines. It goes to taste as if something tasted for the first time, what we will have become. Then you go out to the streets, you try to bargain driving your life like a nail deep into time. So you’re not just running around, you’re also yourself deep into that. So you have so many of these images that are so complex. They’re not just kind of going one way.

Jane Hirschfield:

Art doesn’t give us fixed answers that then let you build a motor that will do x, y, and z. But it gives you Robert Frost’s Momentary Stay against Confusion. And over a lifetime we find more and more complex and ambivalent and ambidextrous stays against confusion. I think you were talking about how the poems move in a lot of different directions and there. And I think that ism art never simplifies. If you want even one gorgeous line, one brush stroke, that is the entire work of art. It is not simplifying. It is making visible the invisible except that we intuited out of it. The gesture of the hand, the brush, the source of the bristles, the negative space as much as the positive, the vastness of the universe surrounding the one line on the rice paper. That is what art does for simplification. We have politicians running for office, but I think art just, it makes us more content with the unaccessible complexities of existence and it allows us to feel them as a joy and not as a rebuke to our lives.

Laurie Anderson:

The process of stopping time for me has to do with the breath completely. And it is a very classic meditation technique of focusing on the breath. And while you’re doing it in time, it does have the feeling that you have been able to stop it. Of course you haven’t. But the sense of peacefulness that controlling of your own breath can give you is enormous. And it’s probably the only thing that’s able to, I used to comfort myself and try to live because I basically wake up every day and have most of my life in despair, I would say would pretty much describe it. I never get up when I feel like that, but I use many breathing exercises to come back into my body, into my mind. And I trust that more than anything, trust my own body more than anything. Those answers aren’t out there, they’re just within your own body and mind. And so to feel that kind of control is also to feel a lot of serenity so that you really become not so flag in the wind. You have a stability that helps you. And it’s for me, the reason I can do things and live and try to be a human being. How about you stopping time? How do you do it?

Jane Hirschfield:

Oh, sometimes meditation and sometimes time stops itself. Something happens. I have neither been aware of inviting it or done anything, but it happens not many times, more than three, but not that many times over a lifetime. But you fall into things and then time has loosened its grip.

Laurie Anderson:

You have only one minute and you’re promised to read a really short poem.

Jane Hirschfield:

Yes, I promised to read. So here’s the farewell poem for you all. This is not my poem. This is the Japanese poet Issa and a poem of great tenderness, a poem of the small and the large and a poem saying you do not have to hurry through this life. So here is Issa’s poem: 

Oh snail,

climb Fuji,

slowly, slowly

Tim McHenry:

Thank you for listening to About Time. If you liked this program, you’ll enjoy the Rubin’s AWAKEN podcast which explores the dynamic path to enlightenment. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or online at rubinmuseum.org. And be sure to follow us on social media @rubinmuseum.

Please also consider supporting the Museum’s global mission to present Himalayan art and its insights by becoming a Friend of the Rubin at rubinmuseum.org/friends.

About Time was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About Time was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

And until next time.