On very rainy days, across the street from us a stream forms in our neighbor’s yard. Gathering speed as it nears his property line; it flows under the road and empties out into our yard.
If it is raining hard enough, it continues its journey down our bank, through the bushes and trees, and into our neighbor’s side of the bank before tumbling into the stream that runs behind our house.
I know that this stream comes from another neighborhood, passes through our property, and travels under another street before merging into a beautiful pond. After settling into the pond, it then flows out into another stream, and that stream that eventually merges with a bigger one.
All this water is traveling, flowing, and merging across unseen boundaries without a worry about crossing the boundaries of ownership and property lines.
Where we live, there is a black cat that belongs to one neighbor, but his territory extends into the whole block. Every day he patrols each of our yards following his own path with no regard to boundaries.
We often see the hawks that nest in our tiny backyard forest flying over the pond a few blocks away; there are no boundaries or property lines for them either.
The birds we feed sometimes are gone for days. I figure they go on some kind of bird convention. Whatever they are doing; it is not on a piece of property that they own.
This same idea applies to time. We measure time by in mini-seconds. Nature has no such measurement.
When the power goes out, we are thankful for the clocks that run on batteries, or the generators that start up refrigerators or computers. However, a glance outside tells us that nothing in nature has noticed the boundaries of time.
Life continues ownerless, boundaryless, and timeless.
As humans, we set up so many boundaries and rules. Some of these are property boundaries. However, we also own ideological boundaries, religious boundaries, and political boundaries. We have height, weight, sex, and age boundaries.
Yes, some boundaries, like fences along a cliff, act to protect us from unseen danger.
However, most of our boundaries are to separate and divide, as if that was a natural thing to do.
Nature tells us otherwise.