Daily Bread and fading time

 I stand here oberving — the bakery sign hanging quiet over an old Guangzhou street, wires looping overhead like the tangled veins of thought. An elderly woman steps forward alone, folding herself into the narrow corridor of buildings and years.

Daily Bread. 美日面包店.

Once, these words promised warmth — fresh loaves, soft crumb, the hush of dawn broken by the smell of flour rising into life. Now, at sixty-one, bread has become an echo in my mouth. Gluten-free — a small, unassuming boundary between what once nourished me and what my body now refuses. A subtle gate I carry within.

She walks away from me — or perhaps I am walking with her — empty hands, slow steps. She carries no bag, no bread, only the certainty that she is still moving. That is enough.

Heidegger reminds me: Being is never separate from Time. We do not stand outside it — we dwell within its clearing, die Lichtung, where everything comes into presence, if only for a breath. Time does not flow like a river outside of me — it wells up through my days, seeps through my bones, drifts in these wires overhead. It hums in the cracked facades, the bakery shutters, the tired bricks that remember more than they tell.

To be — to truly be — is not to hold onto time but to let it pass through me, to dwell in it, to lean into its openness. Time is not what ages me; it is the hidden depth that makes each step real.

Giedion murmurs that architecture is never still — that these streets are not only stone and wood, but folds of space-time, human intention hardened and softened by years. This lane is a map of people and days — yesterday’s loaves, today’s emptiness, tomorrow’s silence when the ovens go cold and the sign fades into memory.

But then Zhuangzi drifts in — light as a butterfly’s wing. He dissolves my seriousness with a question: Am I the dreamer, or the dreamed? Is this old woman crossing the street my thought, or am I hers? Is bread real, or just hunger dreaming of shape? Is time mine, or am I the fleeting shape time wears for a while?

Mystery upon mystery — the gateway to all that cannot be named.
I stand here, sixty-one years worn and lighter for it. Bread gone, but hunger still intact — not for crust, but for breath, for drift, for what waits down this narrow street.

The bakery’s promise is behind me now. Ahead, the wires hum, binding old buildings and the pulse of this street to the clearing that is my life. I walk on, empty-handed, carried forward by the open secret Heidegger left behind: that time is not a cage but the quiet clearing where Being steps forward to greet me, then drifts away like a street in Guangzhou at dawn.

The bread is gone. The street remains. I keep walking.