Capturing Moments: How a Solstice Gathering Sparked Insights on Time and Our Connections

I've been in the garden and working outside in the long summer days for several weeks now, and last Friday night I celebrated the 2025 summer solstice with a smudging ceremony with friends of mine, and afterward we laughed and danced well into the night - long after Mother Sun had wound her way down over the horizon.   The sky sparkled with starry pinpricks above while we frolicked until sweat (and mosquitoes) decided to chase us inside. 

Of course it was followed by a time of inspiration.   

Long after my friends left for their homes, I sat on the floor in my parlor passing through old photographs - walking down memory lane, as it were.  And what a journey it was!

I looked at photos of my father - who took his migration nearly 16 years ago now.  I found photos of the gravestone of one of my aunts (on my mother's line) - and I recalled how I had forgotten that it had been 25 years since she left on her journey!  I looked at pictures of my daughter, now aged 10, when she was just wee and still learning some of the necessary elements for life: walking, talking, etc.  I looked at faces I hadn't looked at in years - in a couple of occasions decades - and I realized what might be a universal concept that we are intended to grasp but are kept too busy to:  time as we know it is a fictional construct and has very little - if any - correlation to living and, consequently, to dying. 

I realize it may seem like I am contradicting myself here, but hang in there.  Allow me to explain. 

Time is a construct of our own making - it does not exist fundamentally outside of our perception.

These photographs that I looked at are image captures that show me the physical manifestation of people whose molecules once interacted with mine on a finite timeline.  But these photographs do not capture the people themselves.   Before anyone tells me this is a matter of semantics, let me argue: this is important. This distinction is fundamental to the way we view and interact with the universe. Call it semantics if you wish, but it remains critical to our development of an alternate (hopefully improved) paradigm.  These interactions are alive and well; and I need only to visit them on my timeline to experience them.   They are not removed from me; or rather I should say they are not removed from my thread in the tapestry.  If I pluck the thread (by looking at photos perhaps, or thinking back about the past) they return to me; instantly, as if no time at all had passed. 

What does this mean? 

Only this: that time itself is merely a function of memory and anticipation in our minds. Memory is the past for us, anticipation (or worry if it suits you better) is the future. But neither truly exist: there is only always right now.  We will always be experiencing now eternally - and even at the moment when our time for departure arrives, it will still be right now, and when we are finally reunited with Source we will no longer experience worry or anticipation and misunderstand them to be absolutes in a physical reality. We will know them for what they are instead:  a construct of our own making, created in an effort to navigate a demanding and complexly matrixed world that required of us a localized perception of the conscious universe.