The Privilege of Witnessing

I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time.

Perhaps it’s because I’m approaching 70. Perhaps it’s because my family has grown large enough now that I can look around and see several generations moving through their lives at the same time.

Children become adults. They fall in love and marry. They have children of their own. Those children grow up, leave home, begin careers, go to college, fall in love and start creating lives and families of their own.

And somehow, I have had the extraordinary privilege of witnessing so much of it.

There is such joy in that, but there is an ache in it too. Not really sadness. It’s something more tender, the awareness that this particular moment will never come again.

A child will only be three once. A grandson will only leave for college once. A daughter will experience the transition from raising children to an empty nest once. There are countless ordinary moments happening around us that don’t seem particularly important until, one day, we realize they have become memories.

Time moves on.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this same awareness has always been present in my relationship with nature.

There have been moments throughout my life when I’ve found myself completely stopped by something—the power of the ocean, a bird, the changing light, a quiet landscape. For whatever reason, I was still enough in that moment to truly notice.

I witnessed it.

And some of those moments have stayed with me for decades.

Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do with my paintings.

I am drawn to surfaces that hold evidence of what came before. I build layers, cover them, sand them away and reveal them again. Earlier marks aren’t completely gone. Their traces remain underneath what comes next.

I’m beginning to understand that this isn’t simply a technique I enjoy. It reflects the way I experience life.

One generation doesn’t disappear when the next one arrives. Something remains. Something is carried forward. New layers are continually being added while traces of what came before are still there beneath the surface.

Memory. Passage. Evidence of time gone by.

Perhaps I’ve been painting these things because they are what move me most deeply in life.

And as I grow older, I feel less sadness about the passage of time than reverence for having been here to witness it.

To see a life unfold—our own or someone else’s—is an extraordinary privilege.

We can’t hold onto any of it. We can’t stop the tide or keep a child small or make an evening last forever.

But we can be present.

We can notice.

We can remember.

And perhaps, every once in a while, we can make something that carries a little of that feeling forward.

Life is fleeting, but it is sacred. Pay attention.