Time and Tide

How did it get so late so soon?

Dr Seuss

My great grandfather had a beautiful gold pocket watch, with intricate engravings and an elegant face. A tiny slide on the side opens up the back of the watch, so that you can see the workings - a miniature landscape of cogs and wheels, all moving and clicking. It is exquisite, and a little bit magical. My father loved clocks and watches, as did my grandfather, and loved too the motion of the stars, in their orderly march through the seasons and years.

I am thinking much of time, as the new year arrives, my birthday just a few weeks away. I stand sometimes on the roof of our house, watching the moon rise. When I look at the stars I am looking back in time, in some cases further back than I can comprehend or imagine. Even the events of my own life seem far away; the seasons of childhood and young adulthood are memories receding into an ever-growing distance that cannot be retraced. I pore over old photographs of my parents and their parents as children, grainy pictures in black and white, the background not always easy to interpret, the landscape of their lives a fading blur.

I know that I am part of a thread reaching back into a history largely unknown to me, lived in lands far from the one I call home. The thread will continue after I die; I too will become a memory for a generation of two, and then forgotten. I ponder on all that feels important and pressing for me in this moment and wonder What is it for? If my life is but a walking shadow, in Shakespeare's words, how do I order my days? On what do I draw to give shape to my choices?

It is raining very softly here as I type. I hear birdsong and a gentle breeze, leaves rustling. I see purple salvia and pink foxgloves in the garden below the balcony where I sit, and the branches of the willow and the apricot tree through the doors at the far end of the kitchen. Spekboom, plectranthus, cyclamen and ferns fill pots along the balcony railing and at my feet. Our dog lies sleeping on the carpet a few paces away. I love this place, love my garden, delight in the ongoing conversation with trees, flowers, soil and sky. This morning I held a tiny frog and helped her to find water. Yesterday I watched dragonflies hover above my head in the early morning sun.

It's all so fleeting. The flowers fall and die. Sometimes what I plant withers, and not all my intentions take root. But some do. Some flourish, even thrive. Some time ago I reflected on what it is that makes some things beautiful to me - pebbles, pinecones, the shed skin of a rain spider. There are so many of these things in the world, yet for some I feel an affinity, one that emerges out of memory and relationship - the owl feather I picked up the day I felt sad about my father's passing, the little tin full of seeds and stones my son used to collect and give me, Some pixie love for you, Mom he'd say as he handed them to me with his little-boy hands.

Maybe it is love, and the relationships born out of love for and delight in people, and in the world around me, that shapes my days. My great grandfather's pocket watch is a true work of art, and I would find it beautiful in a museum or shop window. But it is precious to me and to my family because it hung from a chain round his waist, and because even though I met him only once or twice, I know he was kind, and remember the sweets he gifted me, as a very little girl, tucked into a tiny black drawstring bag. Something of his life is caught in the weave of my DNA, tho' I will probably never untangle all its meaning. Perhaps love is the thread that binds past to present, and one day to another.

How did it get so late so soon? Dr Seuss asks. I feel this often, the sense that life is too short and I will never do or be enough to ever feel at rest. But as I head into 2023, I find my thoughts turning. It isn't late; it's only now. And if now is filled with loving attention, then that is enough.