October 9, 2023
Greetings from the progression,
I was talking to God about the seasons and time and how things pass through it. I confessed I missed summer. God suggested patience. We both laughed a little at that.
This conversation happened on a steep trail on the edge of Maine. The fog had only just lifted enough to see out into the ocean, but the clouds hung low, frosting the tips of the trees and seeping into the world in mist and drips.
Autumn is a different kind of blossoming, God said, an aging in a different direction. It seems most of our conversations include these Rubik’s cubes for me to twist and play with. I will confess I never solve them, nor am I meant to, but having them in my hands makes the hours interesting.
Driving toward the Atlantic, I saw that our mark on the world aged from east to west.
The closer I got to that ocean the older things became. The stone walls, the dates on the gravestones, the age of the towns. Bridges made of rusted iron, stacked rocks, roads paved with cobblestone. Even the people seemed closer to things centuries ago than people a thousand miles further west.
These mountains in the east are older, worn smoother by the seasons, not as angular and dramatic as their cousins in the west. As I stepped along the trail, I sensed the fractured granite beneath my feet held a history far different from mountains I’d climbed in Colorado, evolved in a unique way from the Dolomites or the Sierra Nevadas.
The trail wove through the pines, holding up a dull gray canopy. The morning had been full already, I could feel the light change as we moved through the dark creation outside of this whirling ball. The day was aging east to west.
I mentioned this to God, and as usual, I was presented with other puzzles to think about. God noted that the day ages differently depending on how close we are to the middle curve of the world. People who stood closest to the greased axle of the place would see a different day. It was the same world, but was it? Were people aging faster at the poles than at the equator?
The forest was littered with leaves and pine cones, of broken parts of trees, fragrant needles, and bits of rockfall. It was maturing right in front of me. Some of it would pass in days, others seasons, still others in millennia.
I asked God if time aged too, and the answer was another mystery. God asked if I thought that time passed the same way for everyone. Does it arrive and pause and travel on in the same way for me, no matter what the clock says? So does time age the same? Stop, I said. I need to concentrate on where I’m walking.
I came to a place where I had to climb over boulders, pulling myself up over the slippery rock, holding onto young trees wedged in unlikely places. My muscles and joints complained good-naturedly.
“The seasons age from north to south,” I said to the little maple that helped me up, this one adorned in green with smatterings of gold. God, who was eavesdropping, mentioned that it was the opposite below the equator, a perspective I’d manage to ignore. In some places the seasons mature with altitude as well, I said. God asked if I thought that people did too. I said I certainly felt older climbing this mountain. God laughed and said that perhaps there was a deeper maturity waiting further up.
I met two women scrambling on the trail, lost for a moment, and then shared the path for a little while as we all headed up again. They were close to my age, both enthusiastic climbers, vigorous and excited to make their way to the top. They saw this climb differently because they were together, and then briefly with me, and so it aged in a unique way. Later I passed two young women, hiking across the ridge at the top, traveling perpendicular to my path. They were perhaps forty years younger, seeing the trail from that time in their life just as they crossed my perspective, huffing and gasping up the side of the rock.
Time was maturing in different places, in different ways, seen by different people in different stages of experience, a microcosm of all of life’s encounters. “It really is a remarkable world,” I said. Thank you, God said.
God told me that all people were in a different kind of blossoming, aging in a different direction from the others that surrounded them. Some appeared to be in different seasons, others in unusual altitudes. The passage of time changed them differently and perhaps changed the passage of time. You should think about that, God said.
I said I would.
Hope this finds you thinking about it,
David
Copyright © 2023 David Smith
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