There is no better way to be in your body, in the present, than looking at the stars. And where I live outside of Grahamstown - with only pinpricks of distant man-made light in the distance - on nights when the moon is still young and slim, the sky drops to just above my head - so filled with stars that it almost becomes white. And it's exactly in those moments when forever comes alive - when eternity is visible.

Now we all think of eternity as something nebulous, spiritual, metaphysical. But it's not. It's this, here, now, always - with us in it. Think about it. We are part of a galaxy made up of billions of stars, which itself is one of several billion galaxies in the universe. Billions x Billions = Neverending. That's it, that's all. There is no start or finish - just a number running to infinity. This is an eternal universe.

At the same time, many of the stars we look at right now are millions of light years away i.e. it takes the light of those stars millions of years to reach us i.e. when the light of many of the stars we gaze at was actually generated, dinosaurs still walked the Earth. We are looking at million-year-old images nightly. Some actually no longer exist at our time of viewing. We are seeing whispers of the past in the present. How's that for a timeless gateway backwards in the now.

Indeed, somewhere in our universe in a few millions years, some may be gazing at our today from afar, which just then just reached them; and we'll be the past's whispers on their winds. How's that for eternal life without having to pander man-made notions of the religiously heavenly. Suddenly eternity doesn't feel so far fetched after all; and the present doesn't feel quite as isolated now does it? We are indeed living out the endlesness of our being every second - here, now, always. And maybe, as the great Albert Eistein once said, "Time only exists so that it all doesn't seem to happen all at once." It does though.

So welcome to eternity; and have a good week within it fundis!