July 24, 2019, 4:00 in the afternoon. I am sitting in my garden facing the three-dimensional space of my backyard. Horizontally it is deep and wide. Vertically it is sky high. At night the stars and moon appear in my sky. Now I look across the lawn into shadows cast by the trees beyond the grass. Acrobatic squirrels leap and climb through the labyrinth of shade and light. Birds air dance at home in height, a dimension I can only enjoy vicariously. Ants, like birds, are denizens of this third vertical dimension, the ants’ down in contrast to the birds’ up. Ants crawl out of a subterranean earthscape of caverns and tunnels bearing news of the underground quite foreign to me. A butterfly swift wings its zigzag way from flower to weed. A woodchuck rambles across the flat span of green toward my neighbor’s woodpile looking for work.
I sit entranced by the geometrical immensity of this threefold scene, aware as well of a fourth dimension: time. The first three dimensions describe space. The fourth dimension describes the passingness of all things. In this immediate now, I recall other instances sitting in this same place. Memory reverses time. Memory carries me back to past. As birds and butterflies defy gravity, so do memories defy time. I remember the past in the present time and space.
Today I will live freely within the constraints of my four-dimensional life. Is there a fifth dimension? Are there even more imperceptible dimensions? Is a lifetime is long enough to fully experience four?