"In the record of himself left behind, he is timeless."

Rita J. King

A grave in Greece is graced with the following phrase: "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."Hope and fear are locked into a struggle, and falling prey to this battle creates a tremendous obstacle on the path to freedom. One creates a shadow beneath the other. If you hope for anything; love, money or success, then you fear, at some level, that these ideals might never be attained. If you fear poverty, illness or betrayal, then you hope they will never take shape in your life. Hope and fear are time killers. They can't postpone the inevitable, just as no amount of daydreaming can ever replace deliberate action.

Time is measured in ticks and tocks because we currently have no better system. In the past, the circulating sun was the only clock. Then the species evolved and a human clockmaker created marvelous mimicry. In the future, time may be transformed again by mysteries yet uncovered. Swinging between nostalgia and possibility is another nearly unavoidable temptation, and lessens the amount of time available for the present moment. But right now, in this razor-thin instant, we exist.

I first learned this from Dan Eldon on September 6, 1999. I was twenty-five years old and he was six years dead. He died at twenty-two, when a mob of people who had just been shocked out of their minds turned on him in their grief and fury. When I first saw his book of art, "The Journey is the Destination,"I was in the midst of a period of great personal metamorphosis that had started several months prior, though it came to a head that afternoon. As coincidences go, it was almost too much to be faced with this book at that moment. It was like holding a mirror when the last image you want to see is your own nakedness.

His life is a work of art, and he took the time to chronicle the gestures and reflections of a beautiful existence bursting to the seams with what his mother, Kathy Eldon, calls "passion and compassion." Dan's life sprinkles seeds that still take slow root and branch out until it is possible for blossoms to bloom. I can see in his journals that he was jealous and impetuous, a bit of a wise-ass, still a boy in many ways although the last pictures of his life show that he was through with adolescence. Only then, right at the end, was he a man beginning to shed the notions of youth.

Still, he was a child, a young man and an old man all at once, like the riddle of the Sphinx, adopting disguises and attitudes that would never be his in childhood, since that was gone, or in the old age he wouldn't need to suffer through. He never lamented the loss of vanity, hair or health. He never had the panic of feeling himself go on the wane. In the record of himself left behind, he is timeless. For this quality alone, his work is worthy of study.

Dan was not a casual observer. He saw more because he was looking for it, and then he took the time to record it, even if his life was on the line. He was raised, like his younger sister, Amy, to be a free spirit at home in the world. He saw the polar opposites of good and evil and the infinite gray in between. In this endless void, lives unfold. Each of us makes the decision to pack that space accordingly. The choices we make at this level define us, and link us to one another.

Some say the universe will end with complete disintegration of every last particle. All physical matter is recycled eventually, except maybe the last invisible dust diamonds that will find one another, in ten billion years or one day, and collide to get everything started again. I find this idea enormously comforting. It enables me to take life seriously and lightly all at once, and to appreciate the miracle of eternity by participating in my tiny cross section. We all have the ability to lose our flaws and strengthen ourselves. Withstanding such massive work is another matter entirely. Dan was engaged in this grueling process.

I don't think of Dan Eldon as a twenty-two year old man who died in Somalia when he lost his life in the war he was witnessing. I think of him as a lantern. He has a sketch with the words: "We exist somewhere here,"next to a conical vessel, in his collection of collages. This is what I think of when I see it: Dan was born in 1970 and existed for a couple of years before my parents even met. I was born in 1974. We never met, but for nearly twenty years, we were both alive. Now I'm alive without him. The incandescent glimmer of that overlap represents our lives, and there are countless millions of such circles. Like stones thrown into water, the impact of existence ripples and moves beyond itself into new territory. At each intersection, we are created again. Each time a new path is faced, we can choose to be free.

Rita J. King lives with her husband, musician and writer WB King, in New York.
She can be reached at dancingink@hotmail.com