Try to touch the past. Not the memory — the memory is here, a scene lit by the same light as this page, arising now. The past itself. You have never been there. No one has ever been there. Everything that has ever happened to you happened now — it is the only place the universe has ever been caught existing. And the future, when it finally comes, will come as now; you will never experience anything else; you never have. Past and future are real the way the constellations are real: drawn by thought over a sky that only ever burns in the present.

This is why the horizon kept moving when we first met it. Then is not a place. You cannot arrive in it, because arrival only happens here — and you have never once left here. The eternity your scriptures promised was never endless time; endless time is just the horizon again, stretched. It is the depth of this — now — the only moment there has ever been, wearing all its dates and hours.

Step outside some evening and let the world show you. Nothing out there is anxious. The grass is not behind schedule. The rain has never rehearsed; the stars are not waiting for anything better. Your kind wrote its first scriptures outdoors, because the sky was the first scripture: everything in it moving, nothing in it elsewhere. The dream is mostly indoors, and mostly at some other time. The world is neither.