Spellbound: Time Suspension, Near & Far
Greetings Reader!
This week we’re exploring our theme of “slowed time” or “time blossoms” with a focus upon place.
How do both extraordinary and ordinary places in nature–when we relate with them in deeply known, gently attentive ways–open up, shift, or suspend our sense of time passing?
Let’s explore, and share what we notice!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Founder, Ordinary Nature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Weekly Reflection 🌋
- Weekly Practice ✏️ 🗺
- Tidbit of Rooted Expansion 🌿
- Little Tender Things 🥀
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Volcano Views & Backyard Nature Intimacy
Jennifer Ruth Keller
The light changed across the horizon. Darkness slipped away with the arrival of dawn. The first call to prayer floated up to the summit from the valley below. The patchwork of local mosques in the surrounding area announced a new day’s beginning.
I looked out from the gritty rise of the lip of the volcano. In front of us, we could see a string of other volcano peaks stretch into the distance. Behind us, the dormant crater dipped like a shallow bowl with several dropped centers.
Spanning the size of several football fields, we marveled at how the craterscape remained hidden from view until the last bit of the overnight hike. We’d arrived at the top in the dark, ate the last of our snacks as we waited for the sun, giddy to gain a full view of the destination we’d hiked eight hours through jungle to get to.
I lived in Sumatra for two years after college. Half a dozen times, on different islands in Indonesia, I’d joined locals and fellow teachers from the U.S. for all-night volcano treks, the method used there to avoid the equatorial heat of the days.
The experience never dimmed in its magnitude and dawn reveal. A quintessential “extraordinary nature experience” the hikes and the crater views were spell-binding, impossible to not be shaken and awed by.
My last time up a volcano, the week before I left the country, with a few members of the family I’d lived with, and an eccentric, devout Muslim teacher I’d contemplating staying to marry—long story for another time!—I gasped and broke a bit inside, at the call from the mosques’ minarets, the sound I can still hear in my ears like it was yesterday. Eternal, recurring, a gesture to an order of meaning beyond the human while remaining within the human.
While our small group watched the sunrise, my Muslim friend washed his hands and face with the scant bit of water remaining, unrolled a sarong he’d brought as a mat for the morning prayers, and dropped his body to the earth, submitting to the divine order he saw at every turn of life.
The morning has been, for me, suspended in normal time, an opening where past, present, and future get blurry. In that moment of experience time bloomed beyond us. When I remember it now, that same blooming expands in my mind, and body, and heart.
In my 20’s, 30’s, and even part of my 40’s, extraordinary places in nature were what tended to get more of my attention, my sense of specialness and sacredness. In my late 40’s and into my early 50’s, I’ve gone through a seismic shift – ordinary places of nature have become what you could call my “sacredscape.” That is, places where I reckon with what matters most, and allow discovery of new ways of being with others, where I allow and accept the shape of my life as it is, with more spaciousness and awareness.
It’s not as though one is better than the other. There is no competition to be had between extraordinary and ordinary places in nature. My invitation today is to explore how different kinds of places—far and near, grand and mundane—can bend or shift your sense of time into a different key. A slower cadence, an interruption of the blur we so often move through just to keep up with modern life.
How can the five pines in my backyard cause me to suspend my concerns, pausing or slowing time, just as much as the volcano slopes did for me, in Indonesia?
How can I know those pines with intimacy, and care, and the rapt attention I’d give to another being?
And in that visceral, tender knowledge of place, how might I be impacted? How might I participate in a shared belonging?
WEEKLY PRACTICE (and beyond!)
Choose a place you can get to readily, with ease and some kind of consistency, that has some kind of relationship to your daily life.
Think: outdoors if possible, simple, re-visitable. Doesn’t have to be grand or booming with overt sacredness. Mundane is fine. Any form of ordinary connection is enough. Might be a special connection, might be a simple one.
Select one way you’re going to befriend this place. How you’re going to get to know it. Develop intimate knowledge of it.
Could be:
- through one focal sense 👁👂👃👐
- through a poem your write 🖋
- through a picture you make 🎨
- through a map you create 🗺
- through a song 🎶
- a new fairy tale 🧚🏼♀️
- a letter 💌
- ____________?
Want to really stir up the pot: select one form of knowing that may be easier for you, and one that is less familiar.
Example: I could sit and think and write until winter was gone and it would feel like an hour. But drawing and painting aren’t my go-to forms of expression. When I do them I necessarily have to move out of my routines of knowing.
So, a combination of familiar and less familiar knowledge pathways can be a super juicy way to get to know a place.
[For more ideas about this time blossom practice, here’s a recent short video guide.]
Tidbit of Rooted Expansion
Recommended Class with Writing The Wild:
Echoing the Land’s Language: Writing into Kinship with Place:
A 3-Session Writing Lab with Rowen White
January 21, 28, & Feb 4
LITTLE TENDER THINGS
Winter rabbitbrush,
even in your paled state,
with faded flowers, and spare
silver-green stalks, we see you
sway with the breeze, like a dance
over cooled dust and dead mice.
