Viewpoint:Now
I’m at a roadside park just off I-94 overlooking a part of the Badlands called Painted Canyon.
The sun is setting to my left. It highlights the layered colors of the sprawling valley below me in intense blues, fiery reds, bruised purpled, living greens and a hundred shades of grey and brown.
The clouds are lit from within on a background that slowly shifts from pale blue to a deep violet capturing all the colors of my imagination.
Just past the edge of this vantage is an ancient juniper with dark berries. Balancing on the edge of its sparse limbs a meadowlark sings. In the distance a red tailed hawk circles.
At my feet are perfect yellow flowers that iridescent green bees suckle at. Ants clamber in the deep grass, carrying supplies to stock their underground metropolis.
A child’s balloon floats by me. A red island drifting on a cool breeze. Dancing with the invisible.
In the distance a child cries. Another laughs. The incessant sounds of man, the murmuring chatterous monotony of high and low and hushed and shouted tones and nearby traffic and all their smells, sweet and masked and dirty, are all broken, drowned in a profound silence that has no name.
Standing at the fence that keeps humanity at bay, separate from the world we were born into, is a young couple, giddy with love, arms wrapped around each other, smiling, content, joyous. Their love shines so brightly that it adds to the glow of the setting sun. A stranger takes their picture, hands the camera back to them with a “You’re welcome” and with no more than a quick glance into eternity and a shrug, walks quickly back to their car. They have someplace to be. An itinerary. A plan. They will miss so much. Too much.
I take in the sight and am filled with a sense of deep peace, with the miracle of this moment. It is captured within me and I am captured within it and it lives forever.
Not in the past. Not as a memory, now, because Now is all that ever exists.
Image by J M Greff
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Such beautiful truth 💖
Thank you, Shelley 🙏
I actually began this piece thinking about one of your comments on another piece I wrote about living Now and how our “past” affects us.
It is, of course, a collection of memories. A mashup of nows that still exist. That echo in eternity.
I’ll write more about it in the hopes of clarifying though, honestly, I am more likely to create confusion 🙂
Made ever more beautiful by virtue of the ‘mash up’ …
And my two penneth is that no further clarification is necessary. It makes perfect sense, to me.
Tho I concur that it can be confusing, trying to step out of ones own past. When ones present is so viscerally exquisite…and there’s no previous template for that, for a definition of beauty. And yet with hindsight, we see ALL the beauty of all the pasts. How do we ‘frame’ all this?
Your writing is a bloody good start! (Excuse low status English)
With love 🙏 and much joy 🤗
Just re-read my reply. It doesn’t make any sense at all! It did last night when I wrote it (tired)… hey ho, I’m sorry. Must learn to make sure I’m compusmentus before expressing myself publicly ! 🙄
And yet it made sense to me 🙂