Hi Friend,

"What time is it?"

Such a prosaic and simultaneously profound question.

To answer, one must understand the context that the question is referencing. Time is always embedded into place.

Clocktime? Check your phone/watch/nearest time keeping device. Even then, context matters.

Time to go? Time to stay? Time to rest? Time to play?

"There is a time for everything under heaven."

Time in the cycle of the year? In what calendar system? In geological time? Political time? Secular-Christian-ish-holiday time? Social-time? Kairos-time?

In your own personal life: time to go inwards, time to go outwards; time to up your activism, time to do more reading and study; time to step up a commitment to a loved one; time to release an engagement that is no longer working.

I love how activist Grace Lee Boggs frames this question: "what time is it on the clock of the world?" (A quote that has inspired multiple artistic initiatives, including the "What Time Is It Archive" for Chicago's queer and bipoc artists, healers, and instigators.

"What time is it" one of the most important questions - perhaps the question - underlying most processes of discernment. Is this the right action at this time for me/us? It is a question in which "place" - where and when - is always lurking in the backgorund, implied and critical but often unnoticed.

Here in America, it's Thanksgiving weekend. So first: it's definitely time for me to say a huge thank you to everyone who downloaded and shared our 'Thanksgiving resource guide.'

And Krissy and I both thank everyone who was able to donate to our "passing the hat" motion to collect some funds to support the ongoing care of Krissy's mom, who has cancer (Krissy was just in the Buffalo/Niagra area this past week to visit with her. All things considered, she is doing as well as can be expected at this stage of the treatment). We are still accepting financial contributions.

On the cycle of the year, which overlaps with both secular and religious calendars in interesting year, we are coming towards the Winter Solstice; the Advent and Christmas Season; the Year End season.

I prefer to use the term "Year Turning" than "year end" - it's not like the earth stops its cycle around the sun after all.

And so we have started our "Advent for winter solstice" series. It is such a sweet, and again, in many ways, profound, gathering. We are welcoming you to join us next Tuesday (and the following tuesdays!)

We decided to create a meaningful audio clip - about 13 minutes - from our first gathering and share it publically (with winter visuals instead of the zoom room). The gatherings are centered around a story of an animal - we are starting with the painted turtle - and how it prepares for winter.

We are doing this both because we are hoping you might be enticed to join us, and also because we think we've stumbled into a really beautiful format that people like you might want to use in your own contexts - be that in a church, synagogue, mosque, sangha, temple, ecological-based working group, or informal spiritual group or neighborhood group. Please do email me if you want special access to a guide to how we do this really cool mini-series in order to bring it for your communities.

For the commercial season, this is black friday weekend. We choose not to give any kind of 50% off deals on black Friday - mostly because we already offer multiple forms of financial accessibility for our offerings, so offering big sales don't make sense. In general, we have a very different approach to marketing and sales anyway: we don't (and never have) operate from dominant-paradigm approaches to running a small business.

This is also a time of year when people tend to be caught between the desire/need for reflection, quiet, and meaningful social gatherings and the year-end push to get everything done, go to (and host!) all the parties, and generally be as busy as possible. This sometimes leads to a total crash in January, which for some is accompanied by a depression.

In this season, we offer our annual Circular/Cyclical Time Reflection circles. These are powerful moments to engage with one of our most popular eco-spiritual tools. It's so simple, and so profound. We offer these in both December and January, because we know people will be needing them in both months, and we get that the annual reflection moment doesn't always happen before the year ends. This year, this feels especially true.

Engaging in a different temporal calendar is really powerful. Subtle, because it's about shifting consciousness.

For while time is a dynamic foundation of the universe, and thus outside of human hands (thank goodness!), how humans engage with it and make meaning from it is entirely social: time is its own kind of institution, and is wrapped up in cosmovisions. Moving into the kinds of cyclical calendars that have the kind of cosmovisions we are supporting both meshes with multiple religious cosmologies and, at the same time, leads us into something that is far closer to the truth of how the natural world works. Increasingly, I'm thinking about the question, what does it mean to rematriate time?

The upcoming dates (you just choose one!) for this reflection offering are:

• Thursday, December 19, 3 pm est

• Friday, December 27, 1 pm est

• Monday, December 30, 6pm est

• Saturday, January 4, 11 am est

• Tuesday, Jan 21, 12 pm est