I’m in fear of losing a moment; even while I am in it.
My awe and delight are tinged with the knowledge that this moment of bliss is temporary. Transitory views, experiences, encounters: I question their value.
What is it all for?
Moments here, then not here?
Because they are transitory, are they without value?
It’s too hard to accept sometimes - how utterly evanescent this all is - and there’s something in me that willfully fights it. Each time I put pen to paper or lift my camera or pick up the phone to call a dear one and describe the scene to them, I’m desperately trying to capture the fleeting and give it something of forever-ness. When I realize just what I’m doing, there’s a little embarrassment; who do I think I’m kidding? A journal, a picture...they are illusions of endurance. Paper, ink, digital footprints; vanity of vanities.
Kohelet is daily with me.
Just surrender to the moment. That’s the age-old wisdom that I daily try to relearn. But it’s hard and unnatural. If the moment is a mandala, there’s a bitter gritting of the teeth when I reach forward to brush it into the past. I accept intellectually that to resist is a pitifully lost battle. But deeper, in my soul, I don’t understand how to embrace that which disappears even as my arms are wrapped around it.
We left the desert sun above ground and ventured into Carlsbad Caverns last week. I was struck by a towering stalagmite more than five feet in diameter and so tall I had to crane my neck to see it’s reach. It’s the result of one drop of rain that fell into the desert above us and slowly oozed it’s way one thousand feet down, pulling along minerals as it went until - an almost silent drip.
Drip.
Drip.
It’s rain in slow motion: ephemeral desert rains spread over eons, and the darkness of the cavern shelters their dynamic record.
When we came back topside, wouldn’t you know it?
It was raining. Rain in the desert. A storm that flitted by, dropped it’s showers and disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, the dry ground acting like nothing had just happened.
It was a moment. Here. Gone. But a thousand feet down, the rain continues to hollow and carve and build and shape.
I watched a brilliant rainbow arch over us and felt wistful at its too-quick fading; on this plane of reality, I have to make peace with the impermanent. But how overly-simple it would be to assume that this plane of reality is all that really is.
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