The Eternal Present.

The middle of a moss covered maple tree is the first thing I see each morning through my window when I awake. This morning, little flecks of green tip the tracery of sunlit branches and I can see the small birds that peck industriously among the cracks in the bark. I`ve watched the tree`s seasons come and go for many years and contemplate the passage of time constantly spinning in it`s yearly cycle.

A newly arrived robin flies up singing from the maple and the next second it has been taken by a falcon. In an instant the hawk, with its wings swept back and with the robin calling out and twitching in its talons has continued low across the sloping field, through the trees and out of sight.

Did I see that? It happened in an instant! Yes, a puff of feathers at the point of impact is just beginning to float to earth. So quick as to be almost timeless. In a sense it is timeless, or more accurately, outside of time.

What I have seen so dramatically is the dance of life and death, hunter and hunted that has been played out endlessly since life began to live off other life in the unimaginably distant past of our planet. It is one aspect of the song of life: all of us bound together in an eternal symphony that changes players but never stops. Time loses relevance in such a repeated cycle and I see my own life differently.

I too carry within me the archetypal imprint that is repeated over and over in the intricate pattern of life. I am, in the same moment, all my ancestors and my children and children`s children and on and on. I`m also more than that: I am part of all life, past, present and future, part of this physical planet; the oceans, mountains and the breezes that blow. One leg stands in the primordial seas and the other spans the universe to the stars of the distant future. We are all, like the maple tree, the robin and the falcon, both individuals within time and an unbroken thread that lives always in eternity.

Its still the same old story
A fight for love and glory,
A case of do or die.
The fundamental things of life
As time goes by.
A song.