A quiet, cool morning after overnight showers.

A deer walked through the woods below our house.

Leaves oscillate in the breeze.

In reality, I was once a young boy.  In imagination, I am an old man.

Age, what is age?

Young and old describe divisions of time in a life.

Thinner and thinner slices get us closer to seeing states of energy changing instead of a person aging.

Today, I cannot see there is no empty space between me and the redbud leaf nearby.

A leaf that yellows in the cooling days of early autumn.

The image of the leaf presses against my optic nerve as if we are one.

I know that gravity fields and sunlight and gas molecules and radio waves fill a gap of a few feet between us but, then again, I don’t know.

I believe.

I accept the illusion of three-dimensional space because I have no alternative that speaks louder to me.

A young woman jogs on the road, passing our house.

Actions of my species seek an audience for my attention, asking for a tiny mention by me here.

Pebbles in a pond.

Prayers and meditation in a sacred space.

How, when and where do I reinforce old thoughts and reinvent new ones?

An example of myself to myself.

An example of our species to our species.

Saying the same things we’ll say again in the decades before and after this moment, ocean waves crashing on shore, shaping, shifting, scraping.

Picking and choosing from the imaginations of those who’ve thought before me.

Passing imaginative thoughts on to those who’ll think after me.

Paradigms, models and hypotheses taking root, growing, getting cut off, dying.

Facing the test of time.

Thump, ditty-thump, ditty-thumpthumpthump.

Which rhythms of the interaction of states of energy reverberate and amplify signals that live from moment to moment?

The age of the bubble of the universe that presses outward against unimaginable infinite space is nothing compared to the reality of the only life I’ll know.

No wonder I’m blind, not tuned to the greater rhythms of the universe that seem so slow, barely affecting my lifetime.

In the message that is billions of years old, I am a subatomic particle making an infinitesimally-small movement that pushes the message imperceptibly forward.

To understand that is all I need to know.

Direction is meaningless.

Movement is everything.