One scent, one beat, one breeze and suddenly your world can stop spinning.
There is an instant of recognition. In that sweep of a bee's wing, or flash of the passing of a ray of light, you smell the orange blossom floating on the spring evening air; you place the note that caught your ear to its song; you react to the breeze that ruffled your hair. You are transported. Your reality skips a beat and you find yourself standing in some other moment.
Past experience merges with present occurence; you are left, suspended, in a perfect irreality. It is some kind of private universe, somewhere between the then and the now; familiar, but utterly intangible. Prosaic is suddenly monumental.
Body might be walking along the Sorrento sea-front, but soul is drifting through the orange-groves in central Israel.
Mind can be focused on a sentence on your screen, but heart is longing for one more kiss.
Your hand is holding your hair out of your eyes as you cross the bridge over the docks; but your nerves are sensing the mingling of sun's warmth, speed's breeze and wave's spray from the Thames.
There is no snap back to reality. Just as you slipped out of your present and into some other time and some other place, the cosmos slides back. No one else has noticed your momentary galactic excursion. Times past and time passed. No sense of loss and no sense of longing overwhelms you; the moment might be irretrievable, but the memory is there to stay. The world does still spin.
BQ07