My back yard is small, but it has experienced such an abundance of past lives. Last summer, there was a lawn of bending grass and an orgy of flowering plants. In the summer, birds flutter their way to drink from the pond. Squirrels and rabbits are the typical denizens of my yard. There is an occasional intrusion of a cat up to no good.
It hasn’t always been this way. I like to think about what my yard was like a hundred years ago, and a hundred years before that. What plants struggled here to slurp the sun, what animals scurried through or tip-toed in search of prey?
What was my yard like a thousand years ago, and a thousand thousand years before that? How many plants and animals have passed this way and left a small bit of themselves in the yard I often saunter across? Who lived their whole lives here and who entered my yard space to cause mischief?
I know that my yard is a place that has memories of those ancient denizens we collectively now call dinosaurs. How many of those clawed feet, large and small, scratched the changing surface of my yard.
Are there traces buried beneath my lawn? So many plants and animals came and went over hundreds of millions of years. My back yard could tell me about them all, if only dirt could speak.
This has been a spot where millions of creatures first tasted life, and this is where many faded into the anonymity of death. If I could see them all in one glance, what an abundance of alive and once-alive I could experience.
They are all there, the ghosts of the epochs that marched across my back yard. For sure there are traces of them still present, if only a molecule here and there. There are remnants of living plants and breathing animals all around my yard, traces of lives once lived. The ghosts linger under my feet and rise to meet me in the plants that now poke out of the ground.
It is all in my care now, but it all has been here for a very long time. How deep would the mound be if all those life forms suddenly reappeared in their old shapes? What if all the traces of all those life forms were suddenly regrouped into a full manifestation of their past vigor.
All the many life forms my back yard has hosted are way beyond my calculus. All I know is that their old forms may have melted away, but their ghosts still linger. I love to walk among the memories held by matter that has been transformed many times over in my back yard, again and again, and again.