In the woods, I heard an old farmer

complaining about time,

there is not enough time, he said,

to do my chores and fix my fences,

clear away my rocks and till the fields,

I heard an artist complain,

she said “there is not enough time to

paint my paintings,”

I heard a mother complain about her three children,

there is not enough time, she said,

to cook and clean for them all.

I know a writer who speaks poorly of time,

there is not enough, he says,

to finish his books and take my walks.

This frightened me,

I couldn’t say why,

I texted my angel, and I asked her,

why do people  complain so much about time?,

and she said, dear boy, what a wonderful question,

wretched humans complain about everything,

their heads are on backwards, they are not thinking straight,

their fathers and mothers taught them nothing,

their lives are wasting.

Time is precious, she said, and deserves to be loved,

it is, next to love, the most precious thing we have,

it is never still, never sleeps, never stops.

Tell the farmer he is lucky to have every

second of his life, his chores mean nothing next to his time left

in the world,

inform the artist that every minute she paints is precious,

and finite, and will fly past her like a worker bee rushing to aid the queen,

and scold the writer, he must love every minute he gets to work on his life,

in the world, and take the mother in hand and tell her those minutes with

her children are more precious that the most beautiful diamonds, and

will not last nearly as long.

Tell these shallow souls that they will one day learn the value of time,

it’s wonder and preciousness, everyone one of them will bow to it, and

so will everything they love.

Love time, said my angel,

texting me  Iphone images of love and work and

passing clouds and seasons, I could picture her wings beating,

raising huge clouds of dust and feathers,

time is the most precious gift,

unheralded and ignored, do not dare ever speak ill of it, she said,

or you will be shamed,

and time will wash you away like a grain of sand in a tidal wave,

you are that small and it is that big.

Luv u, she wrote, spk 2 U soon, dear man. Humans r so ungrtful.