Light Falls Across the Years
Light falls across the years; a ribbon that ties together mornings separated by decades.
Here in my kitchen on a quiet Sunday, the coffee not yet poured, I have left the lights off. From the east, the sun filters through late-summer oak leaves and finds its way inside. The beam slants low and sure, almost carrying texture in the air, as though light itself could be brushed with the hand.
And in an instant, I am a child again. I see the narrow blinds of my boyhood window, the sunlight carving bright stripes across the floor, shadow and brilliance arranged like notes of a song I did not yet know how to sing.
What surprises me now is not the memory itself, but its persistence. Across the long arc of living, my gaze has remained tuned to these small alterations of light and dark, to the way illumination lays itself down like a blessing on ordinary spaces. It is as if such moments have bracketed my days—beginning in wonder, and now, in later years, circling back to wonder again.
Living on Borrowed Time
When I would visit Crate Elliot, he would inevitably declare, “I’m livin’ on borrowed time, Preacher.”
Are not we all?
Until he entered my circle of friends, I thought borrowed time meant waiting for the reckoning. Watching him tend his garden and honor his wife with its produce, I learned a different lesson: borrowed time is a lens.
It reveals how the small enriches life — the nick on a cup, the cadence of an old friend’s greeting, the way sunlight lingers on a porch rail — until each ordinary thing becomes revelation.
Yes, there is a mild terror in knowing our days are bound. But there is also a clearer joy in choosing, every morning, what to keep. If grace appears anywhere, it is in the hands we extend when we know the hours are not infinite.
That is how I try to live now: making small deposits of tenderness, balancing a ledger with laughter and apology, learning to call the ordinary holy.
Life stretched long and thin pales beside a life meaningfully measured by small mercies extended in love, however short it may be. Living on borrowed time, I’ve come to see, is like living on the edge of infinity.
Peace
One frigid night I encamped, with the Scouts, in some woods on the shore of a pond. They, with great care and fearing frostbite, pitched their tents and in rapid moves, entered their tents, shed their coats, and dove into their sleeping bags. I did not see them again until after sunrise. The short days and long nights of early January, combined with the cold, had leached them of their enthusiasm for adventure.
I, on the other hand, stretched my ground cloth on the snow to lay, unsheltered, in my bag. Winter cold left me unbothered by insects and brilliant stars pierced clear skies to keep company. The great bear, pointing to Polaris, revolved like a backward running hour hand marking the passing of time on the clock face of the night sky.
An interrupted sleep is not the same as poor sleep. I awakened, at intervals, and marked the new position of companions in the sky. Each waking led me to marvel at the orderly progression of earth’s rotation; It reassured me of a night’s unbroken peace.
To those woods I long to return. To again visit the great bear and his companions; To share with my youthful friends the dying embers of the supper fire; to hear the rustle of their efforts to seek refuge from the cold. And to hope that they too may come to marvel at the unfettered peace of a night spent in company with the stars.
Chores Not Done
The air, thickened and over-warm, cautions against exertion. A brief and once beguiling call to fix up, repair, restore is but a whimper. In a sparse corner of my imagination I hear that whimper and recoil. It’s too damp and the soon-to-fall rain dissuades me from sawing wood or clearing debris. I retreat to the table where a seat awaits. The air inside, comparatively cooler, is seductive. I shall not work says my first yawn. Indeed not, says the second. I’m done, says my nodding head.
Marking Time
On the edge of autumn, shadows, long in tooth, take hostage our memories of days well past. Like those with aging minds, we too are captured by moments long gone. Our relentless march to the ticking of the clock is changed. Where we once moved forward we march in place; marking time to a familiar rhythm but to an altered scene.
We are made strangely existential, we would be horologists. But in this season our now has become “then”. Though we speak of spending time we discover, in this pause, that much of it has already been spent. Our minds once conjured a fantasy regarding time. We would measure it, we would divide it, we would conquer it to believe our end were only a distant future. But…
But now we learn: in this season of shortening days, our mortality is ever near. Now we hear: “Take no thought of the morrow, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Now we know: Our memories are not relics to lament but guideposts to reclaim what matters.
The future is no more known to us than to an infant. Unlike the infant whose memories are unformed, we are captured by the long shadows that surround us. We are visited by the past. Memories bear witness to loss and to hope. Love lost is at least a love once with us. Where there once was love there may yet be love again. This recollection must be shared; Doing so is an epiphany for many. Indeed, though captured by memories we are not condemned to isolation. We tell our story. preach the sermon of our lives, we sing the melody of our loves.
On the edge of autumn, shadows, long in tooth, take hostage our memories of days well past. In them, together, we find what we might otherwise miss in our rush toward an unknown and unknowable future.
On a whim... 