Time’s Giving: Unexpected Gifts in a Hard Month

I’ve been thinking about time lately. Living in wild places will do that to you.

In the last month, we’ve walked on the floor of a vast ocean, now stone and sand. And we’ve driven deep into the past, moving from the high deserts of Utah to the low deserts of Arizona, the eras peeling back in colorful layers of rock.

In hiking these southwestern canyons, we’ve scaled centuries in a single step.

Ain’t gonna lie, it’s been a hard month. The election feels like the fall of something, ugliness rising up like those ancient oceans. We’ve stayed away from people, mostly, and walked among rocks and ever-patient desert plants.

Which brings me to time ….

Time is relative, right? Moments stretch and collapse. Our days feel long, even when we know they’re brief in the span of earth’s time.

A year, a decade, what are these in the life a saguaro cactus that gathers its strength for 50 years before sprouting a single limb? Compared to a rock?

We all know this… in theory. But it’s easy, even necessary, to look away. How else would we ever get anything done?

On the road, a day can stretch, the mind ticking over each new thing. This is one of the things we love about this wild life we’ve chosen. We’re a little more animal now, always on the edge of something unexpected, rubbing up against want: too cold, too hot, not enough power or water or whatever else. And so, time has taken on a slightly different character.

But even our longest-feeling days are nothing. The same goes for our lifetimes. The entire breadth of human civilization is but a scab on the skin of the earth, which itself has a beginning and an end. What I mean to say, I guess, is everything passes.

A frightening thought.

But then I think of the canyon wren, with its fleeting, prickly, little life, awaiting the morning rays of sun and then huddling in the shade against the desert heat. I think of the beautiful, green luna moth with its measly week-long life, beating its wings under the porch light back home, and the millipede carapaces we came across in the Sonoran desert a few weeks ago.

We, humans, are no different really. This can be kind of comforting: Nothing really matters, right? Or rather every little thing does….

Most days, I feel lucky that I can reflect upon the gift of my existence. Others, I wish to be more animal, to live fully in the now — no memory of the past nor worry for the future. Awareness, after all, means awareness of change, of death. Of all the awful in the world.

Which brings us back to this hard November.

And so we walk among the desert rocks: boulders broken from mountains that crumbled long ago, from extinct volcanoes, from the bottom of a long gone sea.

We carry in our pockets pebbles that once rode the wind across some arid plain, or tumbled smooth in some long gone river. We drive across extinct oceans.

Time is a presence here in the desert. Maybe that’s what kept us in Arizona so long… It could have been the weather though.

Walking these wild places, once can’t help but see the big picture. We are all part of an immense unknowable thing. Wheels within wheels, as they say. And time is deep, infinitely so.

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving in this ugly and unsettled time, in this beautiful and wild world, in love and want and comfort and need, I keep returning to time. Capital T time, the kind whispered by trees and rocks and the dirt itself. The time sung in the ephemeral song of birds and the sudden no-more of the mosquito I swatted out of existence a moment ago.

There is a long game, a deep inholding of breath, a deep exhalation, a cycle so immense we can’t feel it at all.

And within that cycle, the brief candle of our lives, for which I am so grateful.