I wrote this a bit back now. Mid-spring. I’ve poured a lot of thought into spirituality, belief, ritual. These words held a lot of mixed feelings for me in my youth. But I’m exploring them over the next few posts. Let me know what you think…

The frost was gone by mid-morning.

It had come quietly overnight, tracing the edges of everything. A precise outline of white around all the green grass and the little flowers trying to bloom. It made the yard look deliberate.

And then the sun rose, and it was gone.

By the time I came back to my seat at the window with coffee, it had already started to disappear. Not dramatically. No moment you could point to and say “there, that’s when it ended.” Just a soft undoing. Wet where there had been tiny crystal structures. It would have been easy to miss.

But sitting there, watching it go, felt complete in a way permanent things rarely do. Because it wasn’t staying. And in this case I knew it wouldn’t stay, so I took it in, I stood still for a minute longer than I might have.

We spend a lot of energy and time preserving things. We photograph them. Store them. We try to make some moments last longer and some pass faster, as if time is the problem to be solved. I think instead, time is the condition that makes anything feel like something at all.

If you remove the limit, something strange happens. If joy never ended, it wouldn’t feel like joy. It would flatten into the background. If pain stretched on without boundary, it wouldn’t sharpen us, it would crush us. Time is the edge that gives life shape. It’s what gives weight while the moments, days, hours are here, and it hones the experiences when they’re gone.

I keep circling back to this idea. I don’t believe in eternity, not in the way it’s often offered. I don’t find comfort in the idea that everything continues indefinitely, untouched and intact. I’m drawn instead to something quieter. That all life is seasons and eras.

A way of looking at the world that doesn’t try to step outside of time, but moves with it. I do believe we can train ourselves to pay attention, even with all of the noise of the modern day. Its not complex. It is just the magic of awe in tiny moments, like frost on grass.

There are practices, many of them, that all point to the same thing: noticing. Tracking patterns. Watching what returns and what doesn’t. Learning when to act and when to wait. You study soil. The weather. Your own reactions.

You start to understand that nothing is static, including you. I don’t think that is a failure of the system. I think that is the system.

Nature doesn’t try to hold onto itself. It gives, and it takes back. It builds, and it lets things decay. It produces beauty that lasts for minutes and structures that take decades, but none of it is designed to stay.

And because of that, none of it is meaningless. If anything, it’s the opposite. There’s an honesty to it. A refusal to pretend that permanence is the goal. Death, in that frame, stops being an interruption and starts being part of the pattern. Not something to fix. Something to understand. Something to process and hold.

I think that’s what I’m reaching for.

Not control. Not permanence. Not even comfort, exactly. Just a way of being that doesn’t fight the fact that things end. A way of seeing that lets joy be intense precisely because it passes, and lets loss matter because it was real.

A way of standing in a moment, however brief, dissolving, impossible to hold – and recognizing it as enough. As fleeting. As a moment or a season.

If everything lasted, would anything feel like this?