A little group of minutes

Sometimes in one moment my mind looks at the life I have lived so far in one quick backward glance. A glance packed full of random images flowing into one another, changing seasons, weather, and daylight, bits of music accompanying them sometimes, family and friends and people talking and laughing and waiting and dancing and sitting still. Christmas Eve pushing the car on a snowy road with my family. Singing with Eva in the middle of the night beside a dying campfire. Watching a snowstorm swirl down outside the window. Putting a log into the woodstove. Setting down a bowl of tomatoes. Washing dishes watching the suds die away. Staring at a butterfly. Yelling and slamming a door. Mailing a letter. Watching hurricane waves. Eating blackberries from the branch. A kiss.

No one moment in itself is the definitive one. In the now, as each is happening, it seems small. Sometimes at first glance it may seem that nothing at all is happening. But if I stop and think about it, there are millions of things happening in this one moment, and it is seamlessly taking its place in the string of moments that make up time.

I can fill in its details one by one. There's Per, sitting on the other side of the table at his laptop. There's music playing, a guy we went to see last night from England who plays a 12 string guitar. It's quiet, grand music that lends mystery and importance to this particular little group of minutes. There's the cloudy day outside, shifting as the seconds go, brightening and darkening again. There's everything growing, and birds and planes overhead, and water boiling for coffee, and the neighbors making noise upstairs. And there's all that's beyond: the street outside where a man just rode up on his bike, the quiet woods with animals moving eating and hiding, the ocean lying like it always does between me and my other home, and all its life, and all that's in others lives here and there and...