Roosevelt Fountain

12.30.2014

Heraclitus was right. You can’t step into the same river twice.

I walk through South Park nearly every day. I have captured moments in time - in images and words. And my mind is full of memories which seem astonishingly unformed, yet when I look again the next day or the next year, I recognize what I see, both in its sameness and its variation. I realize that I have been here before. And that time has passed.

It amazes me that I can recall to mind with fragments of sensation that I have run my fingers through the water in the basin of the Roosevelt Fountain as I have walked by. And I can recall that after only minutes in 6 degrees of cold, taking photos of the same fountain, I could hardly feel my finger pressing on the button.

And day after day my hands were at my sides as I walked by – unnoticed and unnoticing. I can almost recall that as well.

And sometimes this all matters very much to me. And yet it matters not at all.

Of course my attention – both when I manage it and also the part that fills corners of my perception when I am not clearly noticing everything – I try to put that attention mostly on how much this place does matter, on sensing this place and my experiences in it, of feeling alive.

For a time, South Park, the Roosevelt Fountain, and the other elements in and around this place that I could name or at least see or touch – they are the reality that matters.

For a time.

I will step into this river often.

And Heraclitus was right.

But nevertheless, I’d like to ask him what he meant when he said that.

Sometimes I’m not sure what I mean.

But you can see and feel the Roosevelt Fountain. It exists in time and space. And somehow, also in my mind.

2.4.2014

5.12.2012

9.23.2001