Kairos
A musing on tempo, tension, and the trouble with always.
Voices of the Wind
Imagine: you’re on a cliff
with your eyes closed.
Not to shut out the view—
but to listen—fully.
Can you hear it?
The wind—sliced into whistles
by the peaks around you,
how it weaves
through the valley below
and fills it
with a long, rolling breath.
It doesn’t press with constancy.
It insists, but with an ebb and flow—
an undulant rhythm
of build and release.
Sometimes it carves.
Sometimes it only graces.
It sighs into hollows,
and seeps into grooves,
scored by the ages.
It glides over the landscape—
sculpted by entropy and erosion,
by ancient rivers and glaciers,
by the roaring storms,
and gusts that came before it.
Grasses bow and sway,
stones hold their ground.
A fox pauses,
at something unfamiliar
on the breeze.
Whispers gather in crevices,
sweep around the trunks,
and break and scatter
between the leaves.
Across the valley,
pockets of murmur
wheeze and vanish.
The air sighs through branches,
howls over fields,
coils in corners,
collapses into a hush.
Then—silence.
As if waiting for a response.
Not gone, but in attention.
Can you hear it?
—
The conversation
between what is
and what can be —
taking place in the sediment
of what has been.
Chronos and Kairos
They are not opposites,
but kin.
Different textures
of the same substance.
Different perspectives
of the same topology.
The first moves ever forward—
its steps fall in even beats.
Measured. Unyielding.
Its path is straight.
—Linear. Predictable. Divisible.
Minutes make hours,
hours make days,
days make weeks,
months make years,
years make centuries.
Chronos is the relentless metronome
of the material world.
Tick-tock-ticking.
Counting without listening.
Always.
The other waits.
Not behind.
Not ahead.
Always sensing.
Never still.
Kairos is of readiness:
a thickening of potential,
a pressure in the field.
It flows and it crashes.
It builds and becomes.
When it crosses the threshold—
the possible becomes actual,
the virtual becomes real.
It is the ache before a word,
the breath before a kiss,
the silence that isn’t empty.
It is mood, tension, tilt.
It is friction, momentum, inertia.
It is latent, waiting, poise—
The wind in the valley
is not beyond us.
It’s made between us—
among us.
It builds from composition:
shape, resistance, texture, space,
and shifts from within:
motion, desire, violence, will.
—
Time is not what passes.
It’s what thickens.
Sometimes evenly.
Sometimes all at once.
Sometimes, not yet.