keeping time
It’s winter now. December is quickly fading away. Time passes faster and faster around me. It feels like. When I wake up, and I’m in that in-between sleep and wakefulness, I feel the fragility of peace. My heart isn’t pounding. My mind isn’t racing with thoughts about the day or all of the things I’m supposed to be doing or panicking with the reality that I actually don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I have been talking to my therapist about the structured sense of time I grew up in. The conversation ebbs and flows between sessions. I recall the feeling of rigidity and intensity. The relationships between peers facilitated by ringing bells and classroom identities—a microcosm of societal hierarchies.
It is taking so much time to re-locate my own organic rhythm. I think I lost it in the womb. Petocin, Male doctors, Cold hospital beds, Metal railings, Saline in plastic tubing. I was birthed into an urgent world with prescribed timelines and standardized outcomes. The matrix of expectations cradled me and my first breath with its guarantees, and so I was subscribed to its logical trajectories. My life force hooked up to the machines like IV’s. Over and over again, I have traded my creative power for the promise of security. And when I run out of fuel, I quit, restore my power, feel the insecurity, and then I dive back in.
This year, I quit my “safe jobs” for what feels like the millionth time, and I stepped over the familiar threshold of insecurity and stayed there. I have whole entire days to myself now. I am the arbiter of my own time in the purest sense. No one else is charged with arranging my schedule. I am in deep collaboration with the world around me. I wanted it that way. And many days, I wake up in pure agony over how to set and meet my own expectations. The safety of a workplace is not only found in its financial security, but also in the structure and sense of purpose it provides. Because how else can we define success? Survival? Contribution? Belonging? Value?
And how do you define those things within yourself? It’s not like the many systems in my life turned to me and asked “now what do you want?” The practice of turning inward to remember myself is a skill that I had to develop on my own time. Which raises the question, whose timeline have I been living on if not my own? And what is “my time?”
The need to feel integrated into a collective material runs deep. I need connection. I need belonging. A solitary, individualist motivation is practically non-existent. I “do” because I am connected to you. Because I want to be connected. Because I need to survive. Because we are all in this together. In many ways, I don’t do anything for myself. I receive, and then I do for others. I am attempting, with great effort, to receive and do in a way that is softer and more natural for me. I wonder what it looks like to integrate into a collective in a way that really honors individuality. I wonder what it looks like to be valued for who I really am.
And so I also wonder what collectives am I part of? I am a microcosm of a macrocosm. As within, so without, or whatever. What are the rhythms of life which am I attuned to? Where and how does my body naturally sync with the expansion and contraction of life? How do I flow with the seasons? The cycles of the moon? The waves of collective opinion and emotion? The weather? I realize I am desperately attached to the earth. To the desire to be connected to the raw shifting of the planet. To my body. I want to be deeply, deeply embodied.
When I was little, my family lived in Michigan. We visited Denver infrequently to connect with extended family. I have a core memory of looking at the Colorado sky right outside the Denver airport. It felt so expansive, I was almost frightened. I can still feel that deep sense of awe ringing in the core of my being. I have expanded around it, and when it rattles around, instead of fear, I feel like I’m vibrating into opening. The mountains stare back at me in stoic majesty, and sometimes it feels like I’m almost daring them to topple me. And maybe they do. It’s easy for me to walk down the gridded streets of the city and forget my sense of place. And my sense of time. I look west, and the illusion of busy-ness and productivity falls down around me. People keep asking me how I like Denver now that I’ve lived here almost 3 years. I don’t ever know how to answer them, but I wonder if maybe the mountains are the gift my time and place here is giving me. It’s startling to think about how much they’ve seen. And how little this city and its machinations matter to them in the grand scheme of things. They’ve been around for a long time. Maybe that’s also why just a glimpse of them can be so grounding.
All of the fucking “skyscrapers” and sweeping, metallic city buildings go up bragging about their importance. I really hate all of this fucking urgency. By now, I think I understand my own contempt quite well. But I can’t figure out how to unhook myself from the stupid machine that perpetuates it. How am I supposed to make money if someone isn’t giving it to me out of charity or making me do some kind of elaborate, performative dance? I’ve been told (multiple times through multiple sources) that my income is connected to my self-worth. Sure. Now what?
The need to fix things expeditiously comes over me. Everything is falling apart! I’m not making the timeline! I’m running out of money! The razor thin line between pushing my growth edges and tipping over into apocalyptic urgency taunts me. Balancing myself squarely atop this tightrope requires a trust in myself and others that I tend to lack. I’m supposed to talk better about myself, but I also have all of these feelings. Every day. The wellness industry and all of its mandates are stalking me. Therapy. Meditation. Walking. Self-talk. Self-love. I have anxiety; something is wrong with me; I have to fix it; this wellness industry knows how to do it.
I took a reiki course at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. It was a stunningly brief online course, but I got attunements. And it was like $27. The PDF manual that came along with the course had useful frameworks. The online teacher gave a particularly profound piece of advice in the introduction of the manual that has stuck with me: “don’t diagnose your client.” Drunk on new, spiritual power and high vibrations, it is easy to slip into a seat of authority over others rather than securing a sense of authority within ourselves. It is easy to “know” what the problem is and therefore become the sole source of solution. I didn’t understand at the time, but that directive to avoid “diagnosing my client” followed me because I was doing this to myself. It was difficult to discern the difference between trust and giving my power away. I think I still wonder what the difference is.
And I think the thing about spirituality is that it is so easy to gaslight people into this abusive power dynamic and to fall into it ourselves. Cults are not a one-off, easily identifiable entity until it is too late for its supporters. Someone tells us something is wrong with us, and they have a way to fix it if we just listened to them! And before we know it, we are trading our creative power for a sense of security. We do this all the time in small and big ways. Maybe we’ve been doing this since we were born. What I want to say is that we are all be victims of them. And there but for the grace of god go I. Because practices of expansion, of evolution, or growth, of magic, that deal with power require so much trust. This trust is intrinsic to the practices. And we need these spaces and practices in our lives. We are so cut off from the wonder and awe and grace of the universe. We need that connection to god. And we have been disconnected for whatever reason. Personally, I’m still asking why, and I don’t care to know the answer particularly. Only that I wish to create more space for myself and for others to re-connect.
And a diagnosis of “what is wrong with you” is a stick in the spokes of your forward motion wheels. A diagnosis, in the case of this spiritually-focused journey of inner knowing, is just another external assertion of power into your own internal journey. Inner knowing is a self-surfacing path towards your freedom from these external structures. And these external structures are only there to hold us in growth. Like soil for a seed. Greeting what rises to the top, what comes to your consciousness in its own time is the whole entire point. An external diagnosis leaves your precious subconscious in the hands of another, while you attempt to wrestle your problems into concordance with their judgment. Your subconscious doesn’t need someone to tell it what’s wrong, it needs care. It just needs nurturing. Like a seed. We don’t tell plants what they are so that they grow. We water them. We nurture their environment. And they grow on their own. Discernment is a tool of awareness that aids us nurturing their environment in more skillful and refined ways. So that they can grow on their own. A good healer, a good teacher, a good guide gives you the space and the frameworks that support your growth.
Blah blah blah. I step off of my soap box now. I rant towards the proverbial “you” and realize it’s me who needs to be reminded. There’s only so many directives I can receive (that I asked for) before I want to claw my eyeballs out. Only so many diagnoses before the feeling that I will never be ok again overcomes me. The virulent, rotting opinions of internet gurus (of all genres!!!! doctor gurus, tarot gurus, wellness gurus, education gurus, all of them!) continue to worm their way into my porous belief structures every time I open an app on my phone. Because I want to know! I want to know the truth! I want to know how to fix myself! Urgently! Please! I am open. I want to know what’s wrong with me. Why am I not getting what I need? Why am I not connected?
And just like that, I replace connection with correction. I just need to connect. Why aren’t we connected? I want to feel like I belong in the vastness that is this universe. To step in time to the rhythm of whatever massive heartbeat is at the center of everything. To connect to anything is to become present in time and greet whatever is around me. My breath. My body. The ground. Plants. The sky. The mountains.
As the year starts to wrap up, I am reflecting on the difficulty of it all. The intermittent cold, freezing weather feels like it is intermittently freezing time long enough for me to look back on everything. This year was really hard. I was really hard on myself. And the year was really hard on me. It also passed by so quickly. I wonder if that’s because I’m also getting older, and years don’t carry the same weight anymore. I wonder about the structure of how I keep time. My age. My educational degrees. My hormonal cycle. My daily routine. Colored rectangles on the grid of my Google calendar. I wonder if it makes more sense to me to keep time in a different way. With the seasons. With the moon cycles. With my breath. With the sky. With the mountains. My rent payments will keep coming on the first of every Roman calendar month. I will still have several clocks that keep 12 hour time. My Google calendar will still keep all of my appointments.
I’m still plugged into the grid searching for connection, trying to sync up the rhythm of my own heartbeat to the blinking light of my wifi console and the uncanny, oceanic sound of car tires on asphalt outside my window. I am desperate to breathe with the undulating wind coming over the mountains. To let the ebb and flow of conversations create their own songs. To dance alongside them, watching them grow with the seasons. Small steps. Turning off the metallic clang of calendar alerts and text messages. Opening my eyes to face the moon. Turning my head west to let the mountains face me. It’s so much easier to write about than to actually live the poetry. In the meantime, my affirmations will be: I don’t need to fix anything. There’s nothing wrong with me. There’s no urgency.
All in my own time.
