Field Note #13. The Shape of Time

A few weeks ago, in The Water of Time, I began exploring an image that had come to me: 

Time as tidal flow.

I have been called to take this image further.  I allowed myself to experience time not simply as the familiar line of past, present and future, but through the movements of water.

For years, I have worked with the tidal patterns of the body through White Shell Yoga, movement and natural breathwork. I see living form shaped through the dynamics of water, and I help people find the wave-like movements “rhythming” through them.

As a natural curiosity...

Why wouldn't time move this way too?

So I began working with the Ocean and her tidal patterns.

I watched currents meeting, ripples moving through ripples, older pieces stirring together with newer pieces. Nothing was neatly arranged in a sequence, yet it all emerges together in a moment.

Past and Future Begin to Meet

We are so accustomed to giving time a line that it can be difficult to recognize it as a model at all.

The past is behind us. The future is ahead. We occupy a point somewhere in between, continually moving forward.

But the Ocean was showing me something different.

When I allowed time to move like water, what I called past and what I called future were no longer separated. They could mix, dance and interweave within what is here.

I began seeing ancestors and descendants this way too—not arranged neatly behind and ahead of us, but participating together within the tide.

And I saw the fingerprint.

The curls, whorls and ripples of a completely singular pattern. Each one of us a unique expression, and yet within that expression so many movements coming together—ancestors, descendants, what we call past, what we call future.

Not a sequence.

A living pattern in motion.

And this opened something much bigger for me around healing.

So often we imagine healing through the timeline. Something happened in the past. We carry its effects into the present. We heal it so that we can move differently into the future.

But what happens when past and future are no longer held apart?

I began to wonder whether the movement could happen in both directions at once.

What if the future can be healing the past while the past is healing the future?

Not one and then the other.

Interweaving.

Each participating with the other.

Each drawing the other forth.

What Happens to the Dream?

And then I saw something else.

I am a dreamer and a visioning seer. I always have been. Long before I had language for these things, this way of experiencing life was natural to me. Perhaps this is part of why shamanic journeying felt so familiar when I encountered it.

And yet I too have lived inside a culture that gives time a line.

I have also worked with many people exploring shamanic practices who eventually arrive at that familiar question:

What if I'm just imagining it?

It's just in my mind.

It's just a dream.

Suddenly I could see how deeply this question itself might be connected to our model of time.

If the future is somewhere ahead of us, and the future hasn't happened yet, then of course we are taught that it is unknown.

How could we possibly see something that isn't there yet?

But when I loosened the timeline, I didn't need to answer that question anymore in quite the same way.

If what I call the future can already participate within the tide, then visioning becomes a different exploration.

I don't have to prove that a vision is a prediction of something that will happen.

I can simply ask:

Can the vision enter the flow?

Can something I perceive or dream participate with what is here now?

Can it draw something forth, even as what has already been lived is shaping what is becoming?

The vision no longer had to remain somewhere ahead of me.

It could enter the tide.

And Then My Body Responded

As I was standing one day contemplating all of this, something unexpected happened.

The right side of my body began spontaneously reorganizing itself.

I could feel it happening.

This caught my attention because through my study of Aston Patterning and many years of working with bodies, I have repeatedly observed a longer, less-organized quality through the right side in many people.

I also know through my work that our bodies respond to the ways we experience ourselves and our world. Beliefs, environments, histories and relationships can all participate in how we physically organize.

So as my own right side changed while I was changing the way I experienced time, I became curious.

Our culture doesn't only give time a line. We give that line a direction. Like reading a book or a sentence from left to right.

Could the way we imagine time participate in the way we organize our bodies?

I wasn't correcting my alignment or trying to change my body.

I was experiencing time differently.

And my body was changing too.

And Then I Saw LOVE

From here, the exploration took me somewhere bigger and yet beautifully simpler.

I started with something I know through the body:

Life is always healing.

The body is continually balancing, repairing, renewing and regenerating. Healing isn't simply something that begins when something goes wrong. It is part of the movement of being alive.

And there was another piece I knew:

Life is expressive.

The body is responsive to the field in which it lives. Life is continually meeting, responding, adapting and expressing.

And once again, the Ocean showed me both.

I watched the way she cleans and renews herself through movement. Tides and currents meet. Waters mix and circulate. What has been and what is arriving stir together within the curls.

And now I was seeing what I had called past and future in this same movement—not isolated from one another, but interweaving, participating with one another, even healing one another within what is here.

The future healing the past.

The past healing the future.

Each drawing the other forth.

And then my inquiry went bigger.

If life is continually healing, and life is continually expressing, what is the creative energy expressing through life?

And what I saw was LOVE.

LOVE as the pure creative energy - GOD.

LOVE expressing itself into form.

And living form heals. It balances, renews, regenerates and reorganizes.

So healing itself is an expression of LOVE.

And then I saw it.

It loops.

LOVE expresses into form, and the healing and renewal of that living form are themselves expressions of LOVE.

There wasn't a straight line from LOVE to life to healing.

The expression itself was LOVE.

And I thought of the heart.

This extraordinary spiraling muscle—curling, twisting, receiving and sending, at once, like the ocean. Our human center of love, carrying within its form and energetics those same shapes of tidal movement, outward expression and return.

The heart knows this movement.

And suddenly water, time, body, heart, healing, ancestors, descendants and LOVE were no longer separate ideas.

I could see them moving together.

What Changes When Time Changes Shape?

Something has changed for me through this exploration.

I don't experience time quite so readily as a line upon which I stand.  Instead I wonder what is expressing itself together?

Past and future can move within the tide. Ancestors and descendants can participate together. A vision can enter the flow of what is here. Healing doesn't necessarily have to mean going backward to repair the past so that I can eventually move forward into a different future.

The field is more alive than that.

The past and future can interweave.

They can participate in each other's healing.

They can draw each other forth.

And I invite you to come close for a moment too.

Loosen the line.

Allow time to move like water.

Bring something from your own life into this different shape—a history, a vision, something you are healing, something you are becoming.

Let what you have called past move. 

Let what you have called future move.

Notice where they are already meeting.

Let them enter the tide.

And notice what happens within your own experience of healing, possibility and life.

What changes when time changes shape?

With love and gratitude,

Kimba