Trains, Tides, and Time - Thoughts on the train from Seattle to Tacoma

Sitting on a train, facing backward so that the cities and countryside races by from behind on one side, the water of Puget Sound sometimes out the window on the other side.  I think of how life can be like that, how one can always face the past, staring at some pivotal moment as it shrinks into the distance, how the piece of you still tethered there stretches and draws your gaze to that point, that moment, for days, weeks, months, years even.  Then, suddenly you look around you one day and notice that you are in a new place and you aren’t at all sure how you got there or what passed you as you went.   You glance down, and, startled, see that you have your mother’s hands.  Time has passed over them, time has marked you. You realize that it is possible to sleep through the time you’ve been given and, finally Awake again, you start to crave the rest of your uneaten days in all their fullness. You look for ways to make them lie longer on your tongue as if you could memorize their complexity and flavor, filling up your mouth like wine – your glass is still half full. There is still time.

And so there comes a sudden urgency to look only as far as this day that is “here” for some hours, this emotion, this dream, this task, this thought, this beautiful food, this person - only at what is in front of you Now.  How fleeting Now always is, but try to have no fear in letting it go so quickly into the distance of dead days. The depths, colors, textures, bits of wisdom, flashes of memory, love, truth that the present has meant to leave with us will cling and travel with us – the rest washes away into the distance; gestures of Grace as we are left with only what we can embrace and what is necessary for our growth as we go forward.  Time trundles the rest away and we carry what we need as the future passes over us or we move through it – however it works.  Clutch at nothing as it goes by or you will be snatched away, backward, from the clarity and peace of presence and awareness, balance.

Your soul is a peculiar sort of net. And time is like a river – you will never have the same moment twice; but time is also like an ocean – with tides that come over and over.  Washing over and over relentlessly, the same truths, lessons, messages that were meant for you.  Passing over and over - the moments may change, but the lessons and messages do not.  And this is how there is no such thing as missing anything that is yours. What is meant for us to know, to experience, to abide with us will come for us over and over again until, through experience and gathered wisdom, having made peace, or gained confidence or humility, stepped into courage or need, finally healed or even having been wounded in just a certain way, the weave of the soul becomes just right to finally catch it.  Those moments are transcendence. Magic. You are never too old to change, to grow, to become stronger, bigger, deeper, wiser – and always more brilliantly You.

Trust your path, let your heart break wide open, abandon fear, and cast your net wide.