The Ground Shifts Under Us

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.

The news arrives each morning: stone becomes sand. This is not metaphor. The pier you walked last year is smaller now. Your certainty about tomorrow is already obsolete. What Baldwin names is not loss but motion, the real condition. You cannot step twice into the same light. The work is not to hold still but to notice what is moving, and move with it, awake.