We might think existence is an indeterminate force bounded by a body, entranced at birth, and exited at death. And that definition would certainly hold formidable value to tide us over until our dear exit. (Especially with all the trails to traipse  and pets to love.)

Except, we want more. To exist outside of existence. All this talk of “mindfulness” and “presence”—I think what we seek is eternal.

“Eternal” is not my word. I borrowed it from Mary Oliver. “Keep a focus on the eternal,” she advised herself.

It’s a concept I often see. It has many names. The most visionary cultures name it directly, and others dance delightfully around it.

In English, “eternal” connotes a faith-based concept of space unbounded by time, generally post-death and usually at the hands of God. There is perhaps a spiritual element to my usage of the word, but it’s less a space we enter than a spiritual reckoning we achieve.   In her unblinkingly convicted paper on the needs of the soul, Simone Weil noted “The realm of what is eternal, universal, unconditional is other than the one conditioned by facts, and different ideas hold sway there, ones which are related to the most secret recesses of the human soul.” It is as ice-clear as yet as anything I’ve read about the eternal.

An Australian aboriginal dialect names it beautifully.

Dadirri implies a sense of wonder, humility, and [an] almost mystical awareness of one’s place in the great mystery of Creation. It focuses attention on both the vastness of the external worlds of time and space and on the inner thoughts and emotions of the individual as a part of that greater whole.
From The Greeks Have a Word For It

Perhaps that is why I don’t want to call it just eternal but rather a focus on the eternal. In the Western cultural canon, sight being our primary sense of orientation, we give it a physical quality.

Like Oliver’s stream.

Or Virginia Woolf’s pattern (which she thought lay under everything). Nabokov saw it without form but as a wall of darkness. Joseph Brodsky found it a physical space: “infinity I beheld on the steps of the stazione,” he wrote in his love letter to Venice.   And of course Charles Darwin who travelled the world and stood in unmanned forests and mountains: “No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

I love Robert Macfarlane’s equation of physical, natural space with eternity; “In a valley of such age, you feel compelled to relinquish your habitual methods of timekeeping, to abandon the measures and audits that enable normal life” he writes in his book that explores areas untouched, unknown.

German poet and novelist Hermann Hesse thought of it as music. In his poem “The Glass Bead Game,” a profound philosophical piece on achieving meaningful connection, Hesse writes:

We are ready to receive in reverence
the music of the masters, the symphonies of the spheres,
and invoke in sacred celebrations
the ancient holy spirits of the blessed ages.
We let ourselves be exalted
by magic, sacred secrets
that capture life’s wild, stormy vigor,
to transform it into revealing symbols.
From Hermann Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game"

I cannot give this feeling a name. But I’m consoled when I remember that even Thoreau, a man of incumbent writing, fell short. The “Something” he called it in one of his earliest writings.

This Something we seek sub-consciously, consciously, and at times over-consciously.

“The need is for nothing less than the infinite and the miraculous,” Vincent van Gogh writes in a letter to his beloved brother. The need is for nothing less, van Gogh insists, and “a man does well to be satisfied with nothing less […].”   Van Gogh’s brother was a constant companion and support through the artist’s short but infinitely worthy life). Van Gogh’s life reflected a choice to focus on art and to accept the consequences of such, namely isolation and its subsequent madness. He urges his brother, ”Seek only light and freedom and do not immerse yourself too deeply in the worldly mire.”

This need, which penetrated van Gogh thoroughly and perforated his often difficult life with bright meaning, is the same mentioned a century later by Mary Oliver in her last published book.

Now, in the spring, I kneel, I put my face into a packet of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong; I know it if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. […] May I stay forever in the stream.
From Mary Oliver's Upstream

Getting into the stream and stepping into the eternal is simply the act of existing beyond our bounded self in terms of our body and consciousness.

To reach the eternal, even briefly, travel writer and wondrous thinker Pico Iyer admitted:

I discovered, almost instantly, [that] as soon as I was in one place, undistracted, the world lit up, and I was as happy as when I forgot about myself. Heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else.
From Pico Iyer's Stillness and Going Nowhere

It’s fascinating that achieving this eternal is both a form of withdrawal (like Iyer and van Gogh propose) and an entering (Oliver went into the stream).

There is yet another form of reaching that eternal that defies both.

A writer of rare beauty, Italo Calvino found the concept of eternity in a grain of sand and a collector of sand as someone seeking that eternity.

Perhaps this was her precise aim, to remove from herself the distorting, aggressive sensations, the confused wind of being, and to have at last the sandy substance of all things, to touch the flinty structure of existence.
From Italo Calvino's Collection of Sand

I collect sand. Sand and rocks. I keep them nearby and teach them with meaning. Even now, they gather. I skim their sides and hold their weight.

I imagine eternity in the mountains. Rock and ice on a cadence of total time.

I imagine eternity as a presence felt when we connect to flinty structures, each other, and the continuations of humanity. Love, humor, hope, landscapes, family, a feeling of “home.” The things we share with those who have come before and will follow.

Or eternity is simply sitting in loving contemplation of the things heavier than Earth, wider than the sky, and brighter than the Sun.

However you find your eternal, may you feel forever welcome.