Last Night dinner

OK so last night after the Dante/Eliot/Heraclitus/Joyce recitations, Abby and I threw around our paper topics, etc . . . over some food and wine. Erin's done with school, back from usc, but she helped us mull over some ideas and had some good buddhist insights as well. It was really fun and although our paper topics are entirely different, they converge somewhere in the midst of past, future, present.
We discussed the everlooming problem of how to find the now. What is the now. Is now detached from past and future? That seems to be the goal in letting go. When we walk, we must not be distracted from distraction by distraction, we must be present in the walk. Have you ever walked/driven somewhere and on arrival realized that you were completely consumed in your mind that you don't even remember the traveling process? It happens all the time. Interesting . . . because I don't consider it such an awful thing to get lost in the caverns and twisting tunnels of your mind. Seems like time well spent. But the point is that you're missing out on your life, the now, if you spend every moment mulling over the past or worrying about the future, tomorrow's to-do list, etc.
So that leaves us with aiming to separate the now from the past and the future. But here is where I cry out that this doesn't make sense. The past is all wound up in the future if you ask me. I don't think it's entirely possible to draw a clean line between the two/three. The future too I suppose is all wound up in the now. The choices one makes in the now will lead to the future path. So, Abby and I came to the conclusion that you can't just have the now, the cycle, the past, the future. All of it is one, a single, whole entity.
My paper deals with the still point. And now I just now realized on looking back to the line about the violin, that Eliot explained this all very explicitly, but I just didn't get it before. grr.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.

My next obstacle is understanding where to find the still point. Abby was thinking the rose garden is part of it. I reread this passage, which I think helps clarify:

To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

So it's not just the rose-garden, but any place. It seems the place may not matter quite so much, as long as the "moment" in the "place" is remembered.