At a time when people tend to think a lot about time, I'm sharing with you a few of my own notes on time that are coming up in our Circular Time Reflection Sessions. These are one-off sessions that we are offering for people to join throughout the month of Dec/January to reflect on 2023. This is not about predictions or oracles - something we humans just love engaging with! - but some of how we engage with time.
As Dr. Who so fabulously the "Big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff" is really really complicated!
Hopefully obviously - there are a lot of different 'types' of time. We experience, reference, and talk about time in a lot of different ways.
A particularly helpful and important distinctions is between what some people/philosophers/thinkers of these things call Earth Time, also referred to as "experiential time" and "embodied time", as opposed to Clock Time, sometimes referred to as "economic time" and "industrial time" and "colonized time".
Each of those can be further distinguished into many sub-categories: the time of rocks vs the time of fireflies; the time of global supply chains vs the use of time in team management processes. Of course, these categories are not completely separate: we are all part of Earth Time - that's just basic physics for you. (You might notice that a lot of the talk about embodied time centers the human experience and/or scientific studies of animals outside of ecosystems - I prefer language that helps us bridge the human, non-human, and ecosystem worlds, as that is far more informative.)
Our Circular Time Reflection Process is, on some level, a bit of a bridge between Earth Time and Clock Time - we use a 'clock time' reference point, such as a "new year", and the reflections that happen therein, and use it as a portal into connectivity and sensemaking with Earth Time. At its most basic level, circular time is taking you out of the linear-and-square-diagrams that are our "normal" calendars, prime products of Clock Time, and which have embedded within them the progress-is-everything mentality, and it re-orients and re-images you back into Earth Time, which has a circular/spiracle dimension.
And: yes, indeed, it is not a circle. it's a spiral. Personally, I don't find "Spiracle time" as catchy a phrase as "Circular Time," though if I get enough pushback, I will reconsider the branding.
In clock time, days are squares on your calendar and each minute is the same as every other minute. In Earth Time/embodied time, your heartbeat is different at rest than it is when you are hiking; no day ever is shaped exactly like any other day, the sun rises and sets at different 'times', and every ecosystem has its own unique rhythms.
I loved Tara McMullin's recent What Works podcast on these themes. Amidst other weavings, including how her cats have an excellent sense of time without ever reading a clock, she points to the fallacy of one of the assumptions latent in Clock Time: that faster is better. Maybe that's true for some machines, she points out, but it is certainly not true for creating a meaningful life. (She also points to two resources that look super interesting: the collection of essays in the book, "Time is On Our Side", all supporting the need for a shorter work week, and the short story, "The lifecycle of software objects" in Ted Chiang's collection, Exhalation.)
After all, what is there to be gained from playing Beetovens's symphonies faster? That totally misses the point.
That's true for growing plants, raising children, baking your own bread and so much of what makes life worth living.
If life is a race against the clock, are we ever really here?
And that whole "race against time" attitude.... that's comes out of colonial patterns (not just industrial revolution patterns) - including forcing people to become commodified objects, enslaved, and worked "around the clock" to produce sugar.
The simple act of teasing apart and re-callibrating ourselves away from Clock Time and the huge cosmovision assumptions that tick-tock within it is and closer towards Earth Time is, for most people, in and of itself significant. It takes a lot of work.
For those of you who are working for organizations that are totally caught up in our world (including schools, governments, academia, most non-profits, corporations, investors, most philanthropic giving organizations, and the majority of start-ups), the wider settings you are in pull away from Earth Time most of the time. (I've designed my life to be less structured by clock time than are most people's, but I too regularly engage with it.)
One of the things that most of my clients are aiming towards is practices, processes, philosophies, practical tools, and other methods to find ways to engage with time differently - to lean more strongly towards Earth Time, experiential time, embodied time, and rhythms of working, sleeping, resting, and living that, well, feel a lot more nourishing.
This is a key part of ReMembering: ReMembering that we are earthly creatures first and foremost, and economic producers and consumers second. Or really: third, fourth, fifth.....
That's true no matter what your "net financial worth" is.
We could have a whole long conversation - and year-long program! - just on the relationship between time, money, and human/collective/self-worth. Maybe at some time....
We could, here, also talk about liminal time and ordinary time and being in flow states and those times when there is no time. Of predictions and anticipations. of the gifts of sight and prophecy. Of temporal relativity and time as relationality. Of working with the future, not just the past. Of Kairos and Chronos. Of Kali.
Instead, I'll mention something else that keeps arising in the circular time work that I'm doing, including the circular time rituals which I do with my partner Krissy. I find this quite fascinating.
People seem increasingly interested in other aspects of time. So far, I've been seeing trends in what I think of as three related areas: "Big Time", "ancestral time", and what I'm thinking of "multi-dimensional time". All of these are loosely part of Earth Time (certainly far more than Clock Time), and all of them stretch how dominant culture thinks about time outside of sci-fi/fantasy spaces (which are all known for time-bending). But I think these experiences, many of which bring myth, magic, and language developed in sci-fi, into ordinary life are all relatively common.... especially if you are open to it.
Big Time - working with centuries, millennia, and, for some, eons. I work with centuries a lot and with eons less so (though earth scientists such as geologists do).
Ancestral time - I think this can mean several things, but for now, I'm referring to processes and inquiries that specifically are designed to engage with your ancestral lineages. This is a very specific temporal portal, related to variations of dream time and to those portals and pathways that involve relating to deities, the Holy Spirit, etc.
Multi-dimensional time - I've got a soft spot for this one. I'm using this phrase to try to articulate the experience of different time periods collapsing into a given moment, or cycles, not always linear, coming to fruition or coming to bear in a particular moment. It's those moments in a ceremony when old harms might get acknowledged, touched, opened, and stitched together again, another profound moment of healing. It's witnessing and shape-shifting generations of habits and awarenesses in a moment. Its the fulfillment of a prayer uttered by one generation realized in another generation . It borders on dream time, and can include experiences, intersections, and knowings that do not seem to be of this time/space/place. Visions, embodied knowings, and variations of the fluidity and volumnous of our shared experience.
Climate Changing Time - Big topic here. In brief: the seasons are changing. Winter might feel like Spring. Etc. What is it changing into?
It's all very wibbly-wobbly indeed!
And its all part of what I'm attending to as part of ReMembering and ReEnchanting our world.
Well then! Hopefully that's helpful, or at least worthy of mulling during this wonderful in-between time, as you engage in whatever reflection, stargazing, card reading, oracle inquiring, blanket-cuddling, or liminality-inducing process you might be up to.
Of course, I hope you can join us for our sessions on circular time. Which can, at times, get into this multi-dimensional stuff.
I am, meanwhile, working on a podcast episode that goes more into some of these themes, though in a really different key. Working but definitely not done - I too have been enjoying some wibbly wobbly down time this week. It is percolating in its own time. :-)
Many blessings upon wherever/whenever/whatever the timey-wimey stuff might bring you!
Sara Jolena
