Life is full of pieces, each with eternal implications. Recently, I watched a movie where a picture on the wall says, "All you can take with you is that which you've given away." Each distinct moment of our lives touches everything - a flap of a butterfly's wings effects a tornado elsewhere. While this aphorism hyperbolizes cause and effect to some extent, perhaps it merely illustrates the efficacious nature of time. One of the great conundrums and fancies of fantastic fiction revolves around time travel. If we interfere with the past, do we alter the future? Or would we simply be accomplishing something in the past already set in place: a recursive destiny?
In truth, it matters not, since time for us mortals is quite linear. Yet, I sit here imagining each interaction and influence my life has produced in each soul surrounding me: a moment of laughter, a touch, a smile, listening ears and eyes, caring and heartfelt prayers, actions of love. Then I fret over each failure, and the consequences of my inaction, failings, cruelties, and frailties. I endeavor not to harbor long on these, as my shame increases until I am overrun.
Now, sitting here in the quiet silence, a steady breeze brushing across the leaves and a drizzle of water dripping from the eaves outside, staring at the would-be stars, imagining them sown across, skyline to hilly skyline, I connect the pieces. I draw constellations in the space of my life, stories of lions and gods, grandmothers in rocking chairs, bears with their tails still attached. Both struggles and creation have forged this sky beneath which I lie. Each star a person, place, an identity that shews me my place in this land, and guides me home.
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