“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Hi Friend,

What is our life telling us about..... us?

This is not only the question, what questions are we asking of our life. How do we interpret our life - and dance with it, and with time? Around this question so many critical discernment processes revolve.

There's often a moment in the midst of our circular time sessions when participants (super cool people just like you) Circular Time sessions look at their circular calendars that depict something about their experience of spiraling through time on this precious, beautiful planet when I can almost feel them being able to talk with the calendar; that is to say, to talk with their life. Because, of course, our time is our life. Not that a calendar - any calendar! - can fully depict our life. But it is closely related.

Participants - people like you! - often say really brilliant things. Sometimes about their own life. Sometimes about the nature of existence. Sometimes about time itself, and the experience of stepping out of a linear timeline.

Here's a recent reflection (on the nature of time) from a participant:

"To be on a linear timeline is so precarious, it is like being on a tightrope. But in this circular, spiraling sense of time I feel so much more held even as I am moving in it. There is already this container, (almost akin to) an entity, like Mother Time, who is carrying me.....

The sense of being held is womb like, and also gravitational. Planetary. Fast, yet solid and tethered at the same time. Comforting and connected, as opposed to being sent out on a journey into the unknown never to return again. You know you are coming back. Maybe not on the same level of the spiral, but still in its sight — in the same orbit, same gravity, same unbroken spiraling umbilical cord." - Circular Time 2024 participant, Hillary Stark

Yes, yes, yes.

We can be held by Spacetime. We are held within time. We are not out of time. Except for those times when we are - times end, eras end, people's lives end.... there are endings as well as beginnings as well as perceptual continuity. Our universe and thus us exist in a both-and kind of way: which is to say, in paradox.

Below is an example of an early stage of a recent participant's circular time calendar. Every person does their own version really differently, and I tend to love all of them!

In this one, the inner circles depict the local seasons where she is in California. Given what I know of California, I can almost see the green hills, the golden hills, the fire season, and a very muddy season! around it she is depicting water, including rainfall.

How often do we let our calendars really engage with our local seasons... and integrate that into how we interpret what our life is telling us? Too often, our habits of reflection and integration ignore the seasonal cycles - including how climate change is impacting those seasons.