If you want warmth in the late winter, it’s best to leave the ice of the valley floor, pretty as it is.

Sunrise on Okanagan Lake

Up high, it’s as warm as May. See how the light makes the stone splash into the air?

That’s ancient seabed, that is: settled, squashed, lifted up into the sky and, well, going further! And look at this…

Look how rain is etching that seabed! Sometimes the etching is horizontal, which is as mysterious as the grass etching the sky above. Sometimes it is vertical, which is gravity drawing rain down to the earth’s core (It never quite makes it but splashes off back to the stars [it never quite makes it there, either.]) Dizzying!

Sometimes ancient clots of clay, washed out by ancient splashing water, are embedded in ancient muck, washed out by ancient splashing rain…

Ancient Clay Clot with Weird Nonintuitive Etching

And isn’t that etching made by water lifted up by light? And isn’t that light created by gravity in the core of the sun — the same gravity that is drawing water into the earth’s heart? And aren’t these lichens living on the floor of that ancient sea and still catching photons (splashing droplets) of the sun after all these years …

… and getting a little closer? It’s as if the years weren’t even there, or were being reversed. One way of looking at it is to say this is a story of time, but what is time? Space?

Space Time

Those physicists did us no favour by not coming up with a word for this. Oh, wait. We had one: grass.

Might it all be a story of light, blossoming?

The Big Bang Waiting for a Bee

(Also known as Mock Orange… Einstein missed that step in his equations, I think.)

Might technical society’s insistence on the verities of time and space be a quaint ghost of the 17th century French court, which insisted on dramas that unfolded in something called real time?

The Court of Versailles Lives On 

Ah, when time is written out of the equation (which is to say, written more deeply into it), the world becomes even more beautiful.