He asks what I’m thinking. After twelve years of marriage, this frequent question still catches me off-guard. You would think after all that time, there would be little new. Yet sometimes it’s the seasoned thoughts we must revisit, pull to the surface of our conversations. This time is one of those.

I place a pause before my answer, wonder if I should burden him with these heavy thoughts. He can take it, he has before.

“I’m thinking our kids will be grown up and gone before we know it. Zeke is turning ten. And how maybe we’ve lost sight a little bit. I just feel like we’re so focused on getting to a certain spot, meeting certain goals, that maybe we’re missing what’s right in front of us.”

My sentiments echo what I hear out in the meadow, a whisper from the wildflowers. Wandering the wilderness, my husband up ahead with the boys, I, meandering with our daughter, the bluebells are the first to speak up. They challenge us to the length of a day, a season. Yucca blooms, here one day gone the following, suggest it a bit more insistently. I pluck the tall stalk of a hairy clematis or “sugarbowl,” with its gaudy, deep-violet bowing purple bloom, and hand it to my girl. Eyeing patches of them dotting the forest, I know a month from now they’ll be spent — saggy and scrawled white wraiths of past blooms, glory come and gone.

I wonder how long it took this forest to grow up, and who was watching. They are the lucky ones, those who heeded that quiet, inner call to stop — who didn’t stifle that murmur, didn’t allow the persistent voice inside to grow more gradual, to become silent.

“For we are but of yesterday and know nothing,” Job 8:9 reminds, “for our days on earth are a shadow.” Wildflowers stand, stretch, shift. The sun crawls across the sky, tying together horizons to bind a day, call it good and done. It carries out its daily commute, and the shadows bend and bow. One morning the blue harebell does not rise, but the Indian blanket bloom in its place, splashing the meadow in flaming yellow, orange, and red. The kind of fire we welcome here in the forest. The sun picks off days, and the meadow yields, obeys.

“…we are but of yesterday and know nothing.” We forget the sun’s many passages which brought us to where we are — cannot recall the lessons and life held in tightly wrapped flower buds, waiting to unfurl. Then, at once, they unfold, unpack their wisdom, stretch as petals… then weaken, wilt, fall at the tease of time. If we’re not watching, we’ll miss it. And suddenly, my boy is ten. My girl dances through the forest after her big brothers. I’m twelve years wed. I glance backward a decade and don’t recognize myself.

“He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not.” Job 14:2

Our focus adheres like a magnet to the temporal. Chases down money and progress, success and all we find measurable. We’re apt to fixate on money, give it substantial attention and effort, as if our obsessive thoughts might convince it to stay. Yet how do we harness life’s truest currency — time? All this striving and spending and saving mean little or nothing as time dissolves as a vapor around us. James 4:14 asks, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” … What is my life?

Might we condense time? Light with distraction, it carries away at the whims of the wind. Instead, might we catch and concentrate it? Let us weigh it with our presence and intention, will it to rain down on the meadow, beckon forth the lilies and buttercups, promise that this time, we’ll notice. We’ll see.

A field aglow with blooms can be passed right by, unheeded. Or it can be captured, shared, its season stretching out by our attention and affection — every detail appreciated.

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time…” Ephesians 5:15-16