Where Chance, Choice, and Time Intersect
A salute to the invisible dimensions that pervade and encompass our lives
Yesterday, on a drizzly cool evening, I came across this story: A Viral Tweet Sent Me Searching for My Dead Mom on Google Street View by Colin Horgan. And even though I had Googled my family farm shortly after my dad’s passing in 2007, I couldn’t resist taking a bittersweet journey down memory lane.
Plus I was intrigued, and somewhat hopeful-yet-dubious, that I would see a picture of my late father, tending to the horses that he loved so much, mending wayward fence, or talking to my late grandparents who lived on the back edge of the farm. Wouldn’t that be a treat, I thought, to get a glimpse of a moment in time before the sands of change washed away all traces of life on the family farm where I grew up?
As I was scanning, or “walking,” around the satellite view of Google Maps, I couldn’t help but feel an odd sense of time, chance, and choice converging, sometimes at random, sometimes not so random, to create a moment that will forever be captured in time, or at least until the photo is updated.
The last time that I scanned my family farm, 7 or the 8 chicken houses still stood, the ranch house still stood proud, regal despite being fraught with pain and the inevitable effects of time — a metaphor for the life that I lived there for 18 years.
I once again took a journey through the ephemeral parts of my mind as the photo brought back to life so many memories, chosen ones which are always good, despite the past.
The phosphorescent fields, where I ran across the vast sparkling meadows with two German shepherds in tow, toward something bigger than myself and into the serenity of the silent forest. It was there that I learned that the great glory of the forest teaches us who we are. It silences the mind in the calming way that the forest always does.
Then it occurs to me, as I internally walk the ferned, grassy woods, that the rustling of the leaves, no matter where we are located, beckon forth the stirrings and murmurings on the edge of the psyche, which we so often sweep away in order to go on being what we think we are supposed to be, forgetting our own grand wild nature, all too easily once we step back into “real life.”
Those disquieting, transformative stirrings are what echo through the hallway of time, and as I looked at the Google Map photo of the farm, the land that held such perils and promise, it was no longer filled with sparkling waves of corn and wheat, hiding an adventurous child and her animal companions. Interestingly enough, I saw that the creek where I had spent much of my childhood had a name, “Brier Creek.” How strange, I thought, and yet I was filled with a sense of love for that creek, those tumbling waterfalls, age-old pine trees, and mud-filled water holes where I would lovingly place snails and sometimes even a crawdad, when they had washed up on the red muddy banks of that forgotten place.
Those memories etched in the recess of my mind almost didn’t seem real. Was I even really ever there? It’s been well over twenty years — was it a dream? It was at that moment that I realized that the role of the forest is steeped in impermanence, always changing yet somehow remaining the same.
“Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.”—James Gleick
And as I was taking this virtual tour, I was struck by how much is hidden from our view, in life and nature, treasures that you would never know existed unless you had walked the path to glean the gifts that mother nature can provide. The old water wheel where I would read after school was invisible to Google Maps, hidden deep within the forest. The brilliant, deep, emerald-green swimming hole with its cliffs and caves was also hidden from view. Those natural treasures, I wondered — had anyone traversed this area since I did in the early ’90s?
As I moved the map around, I felt memories of a time and place long forgotten spring forward, making me wonder how much had changed and how the convergence of time, chance, and choice leads us to where we are, and bind us with all humanity across time, no matter where we are, what we believe, or to what culture we belong.
Because, in the face of life’s staggering requisite for change, what remains is the love, the hope, the promise of an ever-flowing future, leading us away and then back again to the self, where, if we are ready, we can dare to dream on timescales beyond our own lifetimes and find our sense of meaning amidst the vast boundlessness of our very being.
“Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realize the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.” —Bertrand Russell
With love and gratitude, Aurora
