All This...and Now...

August 11, 2025

Greetings from the sliver,

Some years ago when I was exploring Ireland, I walked along a low stone wall and into a graveyard.  It was a modest place, no signs, no huge monuments, just simple slabs of stone where someone had been remembered. 

Like many places that wear their age powerfully, I felt the years there, more so the lives of those who rested beneath the stones.  I could sense all of the generations of others who had trod along this narrow road, pressed their hands on the dry-stacked wall, perhaps paused in this place and thought about those who had been there before, the granite reminders cracked and moldy in the quiet space.

I could feel the ancestors, not only yours and mine, but all of them.  I thought: “All these people... and now…us.”

Just a few weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a waterfall, the child of an enormous glacier clinging to an ancient mountain.  The water sliced along the granite, first a river then leaping into the air between rocks, becoming a rainbow, then cascading across smooth places, into pockets of boulders, dancing and singing its nameless tune.  I dipped my hat in the icy wet and put it on, felt the lines of cold run down my neck and into my shirt, taking my breath away.  I felt the origins, clouds and rain, oceans and rivers, and melting ice and waterfalls. Crystal messengers slipped from the bill of my hat, fell onto my skin.

All this water… and now… this one drop on the back of my hand.

I have felt a day unfold in front of me, a moment and a moment, and another.  I pass by living things who measure this passage in a lifetime which is mere minutes to me.  I pause at a fallen tree and touch its fingerprint, whorls and twists in the history of it maybe a hundred years or more. Nearby, a pair of giant stones, witnesses to eras measured beyond our ken. I can remember a year ago, I have been told about other generations, I have witnessed the stars marking time and the hourglass empty and the sweep of the second hand and my baby daughter becoming a grown woman.

The same day of moments is also suddenly weeks ago, a flickering memory of another age I will never be again.  Behind that is a near eternal corridor of other moments, some mine, some unknown, stretching back before thought. 

All this time... and now…this moment.

This morning I stood outside in the dark, looked up between the trees to see the stars. I watched as they glittered in the unbroken ink, felt the distance, knowing that the light might have come after thousands of light years, long after the star stopped reaching out to me.  I was surprised to turn around and see the moon behind me, held in the sky by the sun still hidden beyond the horizon.  The earth moved below me in its inexorable dance, easing this place into a new place, letting a new light.

The sun is up now, buttering the grass, lifting the shapes of things into reality.  I can feel all of the mornings before this one, this giant star bringing brilliance and warmth, changing things, growing things, making shadows, inspiring life.  Billions of years of dramatic endings and beginnings, of subtle gifts tipping seasons into seasons.  Making color possible, creating shadows, reflections. Giving the birds a reason to sing.

All this light… and now… this one ray of white gold across my morning.

All of these people, and all of the time, and all the things that existed and ended in that time, and what’s more, when we turn and look the other direction, we can sense it all stretching before us.  More time and more trees and people and light and water, all the future nows bending over the horizon of future. All of these nows… and now…

This may be a sliver of a sliver of all things, this now.  But built into each now, every moment and every time and every living thing and every glint of sun in water and every breath, there is a slice of the infinite.  All it takes to see it is to wait to feel all that it is connected to.

This morning I pressed words into service, lining letters and spaces into a shape we might recognize.  A litter of icons, a parade of shapes that mean something to me and, maybe, will mean something to you.  I wrote this morning, adding my writing to decades of writing, a companion to every other writer, every one who has ever created in this way.  Countless books and articles and poems and songs and letters and lists and scribbled things that mattered in the moment they mattered. Marking that we were here, telling what we did and cared about and hoped for. 

All these words...and now…

Hope this finds you here,

David

Copyright © 2025 David Smith