Wrinkling Time? Timescaping for the Chrono-Challenged

Do you identify as "Late?" "Almost There?" "Not Quite in Sync?" "Calendar Chaotic?" "Hour-ish Artistic?" "Lost in Time?" "Out of Time?" "Time-less?"

Has Life put a Wrinkle in Time for you? Madeline L'Engle's 1962 classic Newberry-Award winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time, captured our inexorable spiritual journey through meaning by "wrinkling" timescapes. Siblings Meg & Charles Wallace's encounter with Darkness, Goodness, Fear, and Love frames the journey. Three seers/witches, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit teach the children the art of "tessering," a fifth-dimensional folding of space-time, so they can reach their beloved Father, trapped in a soulless entity called "IT," without Love. Love saves their Father and them in the end.

Our relationship with Time is complicated, messy, often disorienting, and seldom cherished for its deep fissures of meaning and identity-sculpting. A Gentle Introduction to Aspects of Timescaping might help: Linear, Kairos, Geological/Deep Time, Ancestral, Kinship/Relational, Soul Time.

Once we're old enough to pay attention to a schedule - "Nap-Time!" "Time for School!" "Time to take a Bath!" - we become attentive to linear time. Some of us remain with this basic concept throughout adulthood, even to the hour of death. Work-death arrives right on schedule. Clocks ticking, alarms beeping, deadlines, "time off" allocations ignored or declined, and calendar-flipping all bring awareness of the constraints of linear time. But there's so much more.

A philosophy of Time (<Gk. χρόνος, chronos = quantitative, sequential, measured time) reveals so many other layers and depth of meaning than just sequential ticks and beeps. Another concept of Time is considered for its quality, i.e., the "Right/Opportune Moment" or "Kairos" (<Gk. καιρός). We refer to "Quality Time," but what is it? Time is a construct, attempting to measure experience, encapsulate it in manageable bits. "Quality Time" is an attempt to say something about Relational Time; we don't quite know how to construct it without our loved ones, our beloved places, and our favorite gentle hobbies. We "create" linear time because the depth of Meaning embedded in these gems of experiential Kairos-knowledge defies easy categorization and articulation. It's especially those liminal moments of "in-between," when "almost there" and "just been" meet somewhere in the middle. The kiss of dawn, the embrace of dusk. Our kid's first smile. Our loved one's last breath. Kairos Time is the moment we go deeper, not longer. It measures us.

Geological Time attempts to measure epochs of Earth's experiential depths, its fissures and tectonic shiftings, lava flows and glacier sculptings, its astounding fossil artistry. Flaring out of the Milky Way's spiral finds Time swirling and expanding, reaching beyond Light's furthest capacity. How it is best measured might be reserved for geophysicists, artists, and poets. We can scarcely imagine Geological Time's scale and depth. Far beyond human existence, Deep Time tells a 13.7 billion year story of the Great Flaring Forth - when Love/Energy/Impulse/Creator birthed a universe into being. A potent "Moment" of emergent Life makes any intellectual concept of "Time" remarkably inept.

Ancestral Time speaks to inherited cultural legacy and trauma, those ineffable mysteries, stellar achievements, shameful pursuits, and unspeakable wounds we've received from those gone before us. Our ancestors' cries of ecstasy and anguish have filled and depleted us before consciousness birthed us into awareness. We are the children of the ancients, whose space-time-rhythms calibrate the heartbeat of our passions and missions, our hopes and dreams. Their Time thrums in our imagination and aspirations, and we dance to its rhythmic allure.

Kinship/Relational Time reminds us we experience Time among the wider "We" of Land, Light, and Creature-Kin. Emergence Editor, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, reminds us that our concept of time is grounded in the ground, in place itself. "Time exists in relationship to place. We have removed it and said, 'It is the same here as in another part of the world. It is atomic time. It is not place-based time.' And that is very dangerous, because those ties of kinship, those threads of love, those imprints—they are separated from what grounds them. And we have become unmoored. We are a society unmoored from place." (https://emergencemagazine.org/conversation/time-and-place/)

Becoming more fully immersed in Nature's embrace reminds us that Kinship/Relational Time is what Geologian Thomas Berry called our "Great Work." It's this Time, in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction, when the wider "We" claims our energy and being for the purpose of evolving consciousness. Kinship/Relational Time calls us to re-home in a broader context, with a horizon that shifts away from anthropocentrism, toward eco-centrism. Kinship Time is "We" Time.

Once we ground ourselves in Kinship/Relational Time, we begin to notice how immersed we are in Soul Time. Soul Time is the potent present moment, the suspension of "Time" as we know it moving throughout our day. It is the timeless embrace, the moment of insight, the convergence of energies, the meeting of minds, the synergy of Now. Serendipity. Having a Moment. Mini-Enlightenment. Mystical Presence. Soul Time is what binds wounds and heals the broken-hearted. It wrinkles the neatness and blurs the edges. Soul Time reminds us that we are in a timeless continuum of Life and Energy, Love and Unity. Soul Time takes us out of "rat-race" mentality and into the depths of full-sensory awareness. It is authentic, sacramental. Soul Time catalyzes the energy and potency of Art, Music, and Poetry. Soul Time is the time when we reside "in Love." It's the Time that finds even the most chrono-challenged full of energy, love, and joy.

Time to find your Wrinkle!