While sitting in the backyard alone on a nice Halloween day - alone, quiet, with birds chirping and wind gently blowing, a lizard I’ve named Fred making his daily way across the sun warmed mow strip soon after I finished chasing a fat beautiful squirrel off the walls and eaves of my house with a garden hose, thinking about the yard I planted 24 years ago and remembering the inflatable pool in the backyard with the kids in it - just having a moment reflecting on my connection with the place.
The idea of ripping out the plants I planted so long ago suddenly occurred to me, and I started thinking how I have lived and worked here most of my life, and all the best parts of it - right here in this place over so much time.
And thinking about the nature of the universe and time dilation, the arrow of time, and how reality Is really always only the state of - not matter - but really, energy - the energy that makes matter - it’s really the state of energy in the moment that makes it that place and that time over the arc of existence in this specific dimension.
And thinking how spending time in the emotional gravity well of your existence must have something of a geological impact.
As minerals in water turn to stalactites and stalagmites over eons by leaving trace elements as they drip their very essence in one place, so too, might our presence in this fold of time leave a calcified evidence of our being.
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If the soul is anything, it must be the calcified ever growing network of infinitely intertwined tendrils back to the collection of our past presence in time and space.
Memories really are just the worn footpaths of our lives through our specific plane of existence.
If there is an afterlife, it must be forever retreading these same paths, reexperiencing them over and over again, with ever-widening eyes and an always changing, recursively growing understanding of how that specific past made each of those moments that particular now.
