for now

The sun is about 400 times wider than the moon and about 400 times farther away. Nothing makes that true. It just is, for now. The moon's tides slow the earth's spin and push the moon outward, so the past had a bigger moon and shorter days, and the future has a ring of sun that never goes away.

the coral clock

A coral or a clam lays down a band a day and a bigger band a year, and tides stack sediment in rhythms. Count the days in a year and you have the day's length, because the year hasn't changed. Every dot below is one of these rows; nothing between the dots is measured. A filled dot was fetched from its source, a dim one found by search only, a hollow one is memory.