The valley fills with song as dawn spills across the horizon.
Upstairs, children still dream, unaware of life stirring below.
Blue jays crack morning’s thin shell, their sharp cries piercing the pale mist clinging to grass, while robins answer with gentler notes.
Quickened by the rising heat, hornets rise from paper castles tucked under the eaves and branches of trees, their wings catching early light as they launch into flight. Their buzz carries summer’s final urgency. As the sun climbs higher, cicadas respond from treetops—their pulsing drone a slow, patient warning of summer’s retreat.
Breathe.
My mind wanders to yesterday or reaches for tomorrow, seeking familiar paths. It yearns to mourn what’s gone and chase what might come. The mind aches to turn raw experience into story, using clocks and calendars, subject and object to build walls around the garden of a life, a fragile defense against the wild vastness of all that is.
Step outside those garden gates.
Watch.
Each blade of grass cradles perfect beads of dew, each a universe of light. The breeze brings the scent of fallen leaves sweetening in decay, soil warming beneath the strengthening sun, late clover offering its final honeyed breath to passing bees. Foxgrape and inkberry leaves flutter in the thicket. A hummingbird visits the honeysuckle—incandescent, hovering, and drinking deep.
Beautiful. Fleeting.
This morning, in this valley, I am not merely a witness. I draw in tree-breath, and mine joins the breeze. Septic tank-fed grass—lush where roots drink deep—feeds the rabbit, who feeds the hawk, who drops a feather that shelters a beetle. This dance needs no music but wind through leaves, no audience but sky. We all take part: growing, feeding, falling, returning.
But wait. Beneath this surface—can you feel it?
A stillness vast as moonlight on snow, from which all things arise and to which all return. A silence that does not move, yet in which all movement unfolds.
Luminous.
All that ever was or will be rests within this bright stillness.
Here, there is no coming or going, no before or after, no birth and no death.
The rabbit and hawk, the breath and breeze—all part of a single unfolding, seamless and unending. Your grandmother’s smile, childhood laughter, pine scent in October, the touch of a beloved pet—none truly lost. The world shines with them, transformed, in shapes you may not yet recognize.
The oak outside my window might live three hundred years.
The mayfly dancing above the stream may see only a single sunset.
Yet neither is more present, nor more complete.
The sun clears the ridge of trees.
Light spills across the valley, touching each leaf and stone.
The world needs no correction—only to be seen.
Here. Now. Thus.
Eternity is not a river of time carrying us forward, but a vast, calm, sunlit sea in which we have always swum—each moment at the center, touching all others.
One Response
Bill, your reflections are such food for my soul. I am a quiet person who is fed both by the incredible beauty of the natural world as well as by lovely prose. I marvel at all you can see and experience in your confinement. I know I cannot fully understand the effort that it takes you to produce this journal, but I do know you are exceptionally gifted. Thank you for sharing that gift.