Mother Nature, Father Time – Meditations of the Eternal

“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place.” –Marcus Aurelius.

It’s probably a moot point but it doesn’t get much more profound in “life terms” than nature, a.k.a. earth, and time, a.k.a. eternity. Both concepts wind through the windswept passage of history and the future as object and subject respectively. They’re almost probably an all-inclusive take on known reality.

We know that time waits for no man (or woman). It marches on more consistently than anything ever known, one second after the other, always at the same cadence. The present is a marvellous concept that tantalisingly we’ll never grasp—though it’s ironically the only true reality of context we’ll ever know.

Time is the issue of eternity, yet both as concepts are so far to the polar extremes of each other—eternity has no time; time cannot be considered from an eternal perspective. Yet, recorded events of history stand for eternity. What’s written is unchangeable.

We cannot grasp a sunny, warm day, late morning, by a serenely flowing creek sheltered by graceful, wind-fluttered foliage to the steady trickling sound of those waters. We can’t bottle this beautiful meld of nature and time. We’ll surrender these thoughts to something more invasive and ‘real’—the temptation rather to be locked into the temporary world of relationships, politics and worldly conniving.

But, for the present, both stand reliably there for us to enjoy. The present: we use it or lose it. It’s all the same in eternity.

© S. J. Wickham, 2009.