Unwinding Time + Creative Experience

Time is a strange and beautiful thing.

It anchors us into a space, place and frame, yet it is constantly changing.

We say time flies, and consider something that felt so fun, pleasurable, but too brief, and feel sadness that it is over…just like that it is done. The memory comes and it can seem as if 20 years, 30 years were just yesterday or yesterday was a month ago or more.

Although time flies, it also folds, stretches and spins – it is a fluid wild thing.

There are many kinds of time, Cosmic time, Kronos time, Kairos time, Mythic time and more recently we all experienced Covid Time. But the experience of time can be subtle, mutable and shift in unusual ways, it is also unique and individualistic so being open to the various kinds of time you experience, and what you call those experiences, is always what is most important.

Kronos Time is the tick tock of the clock, which feels as if time is made to be a task master, harping at one to catch up, be exact or complete an assignment. Kronos is the archetype of the harsh parent, the uncompromising boss, the admired but a little scary educator…and this is generally the modern manipulation of time to serve expectation.

Artists often experience altered time or what might be explored as time out of time. This can be explored as a reflection of Kairos Time, which I think of as time beyond time, dreaming time and traveling time. This is the archetypal experience of the dreamer, the seer, the artist or the visionary. This kind of time unwinds and may be experienced as a inner state but one that seems directly connected with Cosmic Time or Mythic Time. The powerful pull of Untethered Time is where one can experience how time can fold, spin and stretch.

When these experiences are explored through the perception of being human and able to travel past time, and still know where you are tethered to modern time constraints, one can find some dynamic opportunities or even abilities to Time Travel and have more access to parallel experiences.

Covid Time became an unexpected isolation chamber experience where time was sucked out of reality and disorientation became the norm. Time turned into adaptation, having been so abruptly changed through the perception of what it meant to be human, and vulnerable. Access to others was so limited and overlayed with fear and anxiety, that time was changed by circumstance within the collective.

Consider kinds of time you feel as being important to you…Twilight Time, The Golden Hour, Nap Time and what happens to you where you are held there in those moments of connection.

 

“The butterfly counts not months but moments and has time enough.”

 -Rabindranath Tagore

 

We do not tend to time the way our ancestors did, but many of us year to and meet the dark, light, seasons, phases and rising sun with a renewed reverence. Physicists are now questioning time and unraveling it back to what it might be, an illusion.

Perhaps at a deep place of inner awareness we are being called are once again, to enter the mythic space of no time, all time, collective knowledge, the mists opening the veil to meet time and space in a new way.

As modern mystics or artists of life many of us seek through symbols.

We are met by magic and moved when dreaming, and held within the mythic reverie of artmaking.

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

– Ranier Maria Rilke

Ask yourself, in any moment you choose to meet the deeper questions:

• Is Time necessary, fundamental, actualized in all my experiences?
• Does Time stretch, spin, shift?
• Can I untangle time, or move into a new field of being outside of time, to have new experiences when I need to or want to?
• Is Time an ultimate absolute in my day-to-day reality or does it flow and fold?

 

Physicists and philosophers suspect that time emerges out of something nontemporal, something altogether different, discreet, not continuous but ephemeral that what we may see, or sense is tapping into a deeper nature of reality that is one of becoming. 

Perhaps time is generated in the mythic realm, in the creative, collective space of growing closer to knowing, experience outside of our brains and body. Maybe time has another reason for being perceived that we cannot see or sense yet.

 

Create with the kinds of Time you find most appealing!

Pluck the names of specific kinds of experience explored within this musing and find your story of how time is shaped and seen, felt and perceived.

Create art that reflects your stories – one might be called Finding Time, another Making Space and a third Untethered Time.

Be curious about who holds the connection to time in your life, and if parts of self will emerge that want something different or express new ways you are ready to meet, greet, gather and apply time in your life.

Look for different opportunities to be inside of time…